John O'Neill's Mobutu, Lord of Zaire
V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River, though well-written, makes me cringe. Some of the overt, obvious racism and disdain for black people that one can detect in the thoughts and dialogue of the narrator, Salim, or other characters of Indian and European descent, is quite disgusting. And knowing some of the racist and sexist things uttered by the arrogant Naipaul, I cannot help but think some of these racist attitudes are personally believed and shared by the author. As a product of Trinidad's Indian community (although being the Anglophile that he is, Naipaul would probably not like to be referred to as a Caribbean writer), racist views toward black people may have been part of his upbringing and influenced his perceptions of Africa, which, to be honest, are quite abhorrent and disturbing. I cannot say because I have yet to read his nonfiction text on Africa and African religion, but his reference to Central African "fetishes" and an undynamic, timeless, primitive Africa sound like something from the late 19th century rather than 1979, when A Bend in the River was published! Nevertheless, it is a well-written text with, perhaps to some readers, excessive description and narration and not much action. And I am sure (I hope) that some of the racist sentiments and afro-pessimism in the text is purely literary, and not meant to be taken literally, although a lot of it would likely be accurate for how Indian traders from the eastern coast would have perceived Africa and blacks in general.
Set in what is like Kisangani in the troubled Congo under Mobutu, Salim, an Indian Muslim from the eastern coast of Africa, flees from the regularity and dull life of his community and takes over the business previously established by a co-ethnic, Nazruddin. Full of descriptions of the ravaged colonial town and the life of an African Indian in terms of relations with locals and European businessmen and workers, it is obvious that Naipaul does not think much of the entire continent of 'black' Africa after independence. He (through Salim's voice) generalizes the entire fate of post-independent African states based on the horrors of Mobutu's Zaire, but attributes it primarily to a fault of Africa and Africans. Considering the book is based on Heart of Darkness (themes and imagery are similar in both novels, with the central place of the Congo river, the steamer, African faces like masks, and assumptions of Black and African intellectual and cultural inferiority and the discovery of life in the midst of savagery on the humanity of the non-local, such as Salim or Kurtz), it is no surprise that Congo, in the heart of the "Dark Continent," becomes the poster child for African inferiority, incapacity to rule along modern, westernized lines, and the reversal of European progress, identity, and civilization. Africa for Salim, is the ultimate "Other" of Europe, which, he believes, gives him (and other Indian Ocean peoples, such as Arabs, Indians, and Persians) their sense of history and identity rather than their own worldview, which is based solely on living to the next day, never aware of themselves in the broad scheme of things or history. Inevitably, Africa, the "Dark Continent" of bush and river, black backwardness and European-derived modernity, an unfortunate paradox Salim comments on throughout the novel, regresses and Salim flees the town at the bend in the river for his life. In addition, Salim, shows his biased view of Africa and African history by writing out the African component of life on the east coast, omitting the Swahili and African antecedents to coastal society, as well as over-attributing to Arabs in the late pre-colonial period the expansion of trade caravans and towns in Central Africa. To Salim, Africa is nothing but bush and savagery indebted to Arab and European slaving, trade, and colonialism, which, unfortunately reflects predominant views of the African continent today.
As a novel pertaining to the effects of a megalomaniac dictator on the people, including foreign merchants and Europeans who stayed after independence, the novel works very well in encapsulating how everyone, regardless of status, becomes enthralled and, at times, susceptible to appreciation or awe of the never-named Big Man, Mobutu. From descriptions of his leopard-skin cap to the staff with a "fetish" figure to his cult of the Madonna for his African hotel-maid mother, Naipaul makes it quite clear how Mobutu's nefarious dictatorship seeped into the lives of everyone, from "superstitious" tribal Africans in the bush to European and Asian retailers and professionals in Kisangani. However, "tribalism" keeps tearing the Congo apart, despite Mobutu's miraculous blend of tradition and modernity, conservatism and revolution, military might and political theater, causing the uprising led by the Liberation Army that precipitates the collapse of order (and not for the first time since independence) in the town at the bend of the river. But from a historical and Africanist perspective, the novel reeks of outdated racism and recycled themes from Heart of Darkness and Western beliefs in African innate barbarism. Tayreb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, blogged about here, does a better job as a complementary, anti-racist Heart of Darkness, but Naipaul, seemingly an apologist for European colonialism in "black Africa," has no problem perpetuating centuries-old stereotypes and racist myths, as one can see in his generalization of Africa from the political crisis in the Congo. Nevertheless, his choice of an Indian narrator shows another racist lens through which Africa is and can be viewed, from the Arab and Indian perspective, which, fortunately shatters the illusions about Arab-African unity or an Islamic "brotherhood" transcending racism and colorism within the Arab and non-African Muslim world.
As Achebe remarked toward Heart of Darkness, Naipaul's work describes a people and a vast continent, and the demeaning, racist discourse of the novel has power that will, unfortunately, help perpetuate inaccurate, dehumanizing perceptions of Africa. As with Conrad's work, A Bend at the River should not be censored nor should its literary prowess be denied, but it is inherently political and has wide influence beyond literary circles, complicating and indicating Naipaul's role in the circulation of the "West is best" trope all too common these days. Naipaul, who did construct a readable, fascinating text and beautiful prose with an unusual narrator for lens of Afro-pessimism instead of the usual white American or European, ultimately ends the novel (and his personally-held opinions, I am sure) of African incapability of efficient, well-run, functioning modern states with viable, flourishing cultures and innovation, the marks of humanity. Regardless, literature should never concede to political instrumentalism, so Naipaul, entitled to have his own racist, ahistorical opinion lacking consideration of neocolonialism and other components of Congolese failure, is free to write what he wishes.
What follows below are interesting quotations and notes on the text, including plot and the dismal view of the African continent held by Naipaul:
“Africa was my home, had been the home of my family for centuries. But we came from the east coast, and that made the difference. The coast was not truly African. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean. True Africa was at our back. Many miles of scrub or desert separated us from the up-country people; we looked east to the lands which we traded—Arabia, India, Persia. These were also the lands of our ancestors. But we could no longer say that we were Arabians or Indians or Persians; when we compared ourselves with these people, we felt like people of Africa.”
“My family was Muslim. But we were a special group. We were distinct from the Arabs and other Muslims of the coast; in our customs and attitudes we were closer to the Hindus of north-western India, from which we originally come. When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.”
“I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber.”
(18) “Of that whole period of upheaval in Africa—the expulsion of the Arabs, the expansion of Europe, the parcelling out of the continent—that is the only family story I have. That was the sort of people we were. All that I know of our history and the history of the Indian Ocean I have got from books written by Europeans. If I say that our Arabs in their time were great adventurers and writers; that our sailors gave the Mediterranean the lateen sail that made the discovery of the Americas possible; that an Indian pilot led Vasco da Gama from East Africa to Calicut; that the very word cheque was first used by our Persian merchants; if I say these things it is because I have got them from European books. They formed no part of our knowledge or pride. Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed away, like the scuff-marks of fishermen on the beach outside our town.”
“Once the Arabs had ruled here; then the Europeans had come; now the Europeans were about to go away. But little had changed in the manners or minds of men. The fishermen’s boats on that beach were still painted with large eyes on the bows for good luck; and the fishermen could get very angry, even murderous, if some visitor tried to photograph them—tried to rob them of their souls. People lived as they had always done; there was no break between past and present. All that had happened in the past was washed away; there was always only the present. It was as though, as a result of some disturbance in the heavens, the early morning light was always receding into the darkness, and men lived in a perpetual dawn.”
(19) “In my family’s compounds there were two slave families, and they had been there for at least three generations. The last thing they wanted to hear was that they had to go. Officially these people were only servants. But they wanted it known—to other Africans, and to poor Arabs and Indians—that they were really slaves. It wasn’t that they were proud of slavery as a condition; what they were fierce about was their special connection with a family of repute. They could be very rough with people they considered smaller fry than the family.”
(22) “If the insecurity I felt about our position on the coast was due to my temperament, then little occurred to calm me down. Events in this part of Africa began to move fast. To the north there was a bloody rebellion of an up-country tribe which the British seemed unable to put down; and there were explosions of disobedience and rage in other places as well. Even hypochondriacs sometimes have real illnesses, and I don’t think it was my nervousness alone that made me feel that the whole political system we had known was coming to an end, and that what was going to replace it wasn’t going to be pleasant. I feared the lies—black men assuming the lies of white men.”
“If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were moral. We didn’t lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn’t think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did. But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.”
(26) “Many years before, following some fancy of his own, Nazruddin had cut down on his business on the coast and begun to move inland. The colonial boundaries of Africa gave an international flavour to his operations. But Nazruddin was doing no more than follow the old Arab trading routes to the interior; and he had fetched up in the centre of the continent, at the bend in the great river.”
“That was as far as the Arabs had got in the last century. There they had met Europe, advancing from the other direction. For Europe it was one little probe. For the Arabs of central Africa it was their all; the Arabian energy that had pushed them into Africa had died down at its source, and their power was like the light of a star that travels on after the star itself has become dead. Arab power had vanished; at the bend in the river there had grown up a European, and not an Arab, town. And it was from that town that Nazruddin, reappearing among us from time to time, brought back his exotic manners and tastes and his tales of commercial success.
(29) Nazruddin: “Do you know Uganda? A lovely country. Cool, three to four thousand feet up, and people say it’s like Scotland, with the hills. The British have given the place the finest administration you could ask for. Very simple, very efficient. Wonderful roads. And the Bantu people there are pretty bright.”
(30) “Business never dies in Africa; it is only interrupted.” Nazruddin to Salim
(86) “The rage of the rebels was like a rage against metal, machinery, wires, everything that was not of the forest and Africa.”
(99) “They wore their uniforms the way Ferdinand had at one time worn his lycee blazer: they saw themselves both as the new men of Africa and the men of the new Africa. They made such play with the national flag and the portrait of the President—the two now always going together—that in the beginning I thought these new officers stood for a new, constructive pride. But they were simpler. The flag and the President’s portrait were only like their fetishes, the sources of their authority. They didn’t see, these young men, that there was anything to build in their country. As far as they were concerned, it was all there already. They had only to take. They believed that, by being what they were, they had earned the right to take; and the higher the officer, the greater the crookedness—if that word had any meaning.”
“With their guns and jeeps, these men were poachers of ivory and thieves of gold. Ivory, gold—add slaves, and it would have been like being back in oldest Africa. And these men would have dealt in slaves, if there was still a market. It was to the traders in the town that the army turned when they wished to clear their gold or, more especially, the ivory they had poached. Officials and governments right across the continent were engaged in this ivory trade which they themselves had declared illegal. It made smuggling easy; but I was nervous of getting involved, because a government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you. Your business associate today can be your jailer or worse tomorrow.”
(107-108) “And then we began to understand that what the President was attempting was so stupendous in his own eyes that even he would not have wanted to proclaim it. He was creating modern Africa. He was creating a miracle that would astound the rest of the world. He was by-passing real Africa, the difficult Africa of bush and villages, and creating something that would match anything that existed in other countries.”
(108) “The President had wished to show us a new Africa. And I saw Africa in a way I had never seen it before, saw the defeats and humiliations which until then I had regarded as just a fact of life. And I felt like that—full of tenderness for the Big Man, for the ragged villagers walking around the Domain, and the soldiers showing them the shabby sights—until some soldier played the fool with me or some official at the customs was difficult, and then I fell into the old way of feeling, the easier attitudes of the foreigners in the bars. Old Africa, which seemed to absorb everything, was simple; this place kept you tense. What a strain it was, picking your way through stupidity and aggressiveness and pride and hurt!”
(214) “The speech, so far, was like many others the President had made. The themes were not new: sacrifice and the bright future; the dignity of the woman of Africa; the need to strengthen the revolution, unpopular though it was with those black men in the towns who dreamed of waking up one day as white men; the need for Africans to be African, to go back without shame to their democratic and social ways, to rediscover the virtues of the diet and medicines of their grandfathers and not to go running like children after things in imported tins and bottles; the need for vigilance, work, and, above all, discipline.”
(237) “I was in Africa one day; I as in Europe the next morning. It was more than travelling fast. It was like being in two places at once. I woke up in London with little bits of Africa on me—like the airport tax ticket, given me by an official I knew, in the middle of another kind of crowd, in another kind of building, in another climate. Both places were real; both places were unreal. You could play off one against the other; and you had no feeling of having made a final decision, a great last journey. Which, in a way, was what this was for me, though I only had an excursion ticket, a visitor’s visa, and I had to go back within six weeks.”
“The Europe the aeroplane brought me to was not the Europe I had known all my life. When I was a child Europe ruled my world. It had defeated the Arabs in Africa and controlled the interior of the continent. It ruled the coast and all the countries of the Indian Ocean with which we traded; it supplied our goods. We knew who we were and where we had come from. But it was Europe that gave us the descriptive postage stamps that gave us ideas of what as picturesque about ourselves. It also gave us a new language.”
(244) Nazruddin: “I went to the man again. I said, “You sold me the theatre as a going concern.” He said, “Who are you?” I said, “My family have been traders and merchants in the Indian Ocean for centuries, under every kind of government. There is a reason why we have lasted so long. We bargain hard, but we stick to our bargain. All our contracts are oral, but we deliver what we promise. It isn’t because we are saints. It is because the whole thing breaks down otherwise.” He said, “You should go back to the Indian Ocean.”
(258) “Portraits, maxims, occasional statues of the African madonna—they continued all the way to the hotel. If I had come to the capital fresh from our town I would have felt choked. But after Europe, and after what I had seen of the country from the air, and still with my sense of the flimsiness of the capital, my attitudes was different, and I was surprised by it. There was to me an element of pathos in those maxims, portraits, and statues, in this wish of a man of the bush to make himself big, and setting about it in such a crude way. I even felt a little sympathy for the man who was making such a display of himself.”
(278) “Those faces of Africa! Those masks of childlike calm that had brought down the blows of the world, and of Africans as well, as now in the jail: I felt I had never seen them so clearly before. Indifferent to noise, indifferent to compassion or contempt, those faces were yet not vacant or passive or resigned.”
Set in what is like Kisangani in the troubled Congo under Mobutu, Salim, an Indian Muslim from the eastern coast of Africa, flees from the regularity and dull life of his community and takes over the business previously established by a co-ethnic, Nazruddin. Full of descriptions of the ravaged colonial town and the life of an African Indian in terms of relations with locals and European businessmen and workers, it is obvious that Naipaul does not think much of the entire continent of 'black' Africa after independence. He (through Salim's voice) generalizes the entire fate of post-independent African states based on the horrors of Mobutu's Zaire, but attributes it primarily to a fault of Africa and Africans. Considering the book is based on Heart of Darkness (themes and imagery are similar in both novels, with the central place of the Congo river, the steamer, African faces like masks, and assumptions of Black and African intellectual and cultural inferiority and the discovery of life in the midst of savagery on the humanity of the non-local, such as Salim or Kurtz), it is no surprise that Congo, in the heart of the "Dark Continent," becomes the poster child for African inferiority, incapacity to rule along modern, westernized lines, and the reversal of European progress, identity, and civilization. Africa for Salim, is the ultimate "Other" of Europe, which, he believes, gives him (and other Indian Ocean peoples, such as Arabs, Indians, and Persians) their sense of history and identity rather than their own worldview, which is based solely on living to the next day, never aware of themselves in the broad scheme of things or history. Inevitably, Africa, the "Dark Continent" of bush and river, black backwardness and European-derived modernity, an unfortunate paradox Salim comments on throughout the novel, regresses and Salim flees the town at the bend in the river for his life. In addition, Salim, shows his biased view of Africa and African history by writing out the African component of life on the east coast, omitting the Swahili and African antecedents to coastal society, as well as over-attributing to Arabs in the late pre-colonial period the expansion of trade caravans and towns in Central Africa. To Salim, Africa is nothing but bush and savagery indebted to Arab and European slaving, trade, and colonialism, which, unfortunately reflects predominant views of the African continent today.
As a novel pertaining to the effects of a megalomaniac dictator on the people, including foreign merchants and Europeans who stayed after independence, the novel works very well in encapsulating how everyone, regardless of status, becomes enthralled and, at times, susceptible to appreciation or awe of the never-named Big Man, Mobutu. From descriptions of his leopard-skin cap to the staff with a "fetish" figure to his cult of the Madonna for his African hotel-maid mother, Naipaul makes it quite clear how Mobutu's nefarious dictatorship seeped into the lives of everyone, from "superstitious" tribal Africans in the bush to European and Asian retailers and professionals in Kisangani. However, "tribalism" keeps tearing the Congo apart, despite Mobutu's miraculous blend of tradition and modernity, conservatism and revolution, military might and political theater, causing the uprising led by the Liberation Army that precipitates the collapse of order (and not for the first time since independence) in the town at the bend of the river. But from a historical and Africanist perspective, the novel reeks of outdated racism and recycled themes from Heart of Darkness and Western beliefs in African innate barbarism. Tayreb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, blogged about here, does a better job as a complementary, anti-racist Heart of Darkness, but Naipaul, seemingly an apologist for European colonialism in "black Africa," has no problem perpetuating centuries-old stereotypes and racist myths, as one can see in his generalization of Africa from the political crisis in the Congo. Nevertheless, his choice of an Indian narrator shows another racist lens through which Africa is and can be viewed, from the Arab and Indian perspective, which, fortunately shatters the illusions about Arab-African unity or an Islamic "brotherhood" transcending racism and colorism within the Arab and non-African Muslim world.
As Achebe remarked toward Heart of Darkness, Naipaul's work describes a people and a vast continent, and the demeaning, racist discourse of the novel has power that will, unfortunately, help perpetuate inaccurate, dehumanizing perceptions of Africa. As with Conrad's work, A Bend at the River should not be censored nor should its literary prowess be denied, but it is inherently political and has wide influence beyond literary circles, complicating and indicating Naipaul's role in the circulation of the "West is best" trope all too common these days. Naipaul, who did construct a readable, fascinating text and beautiful prose with an unusual narrator for lens of Afro-pessimism instead of the usual white American or European, ultimately ends the novel (and his personally-held opinions, I am sure) of African incapability of efficient, well-run, functioning modern states with viable, flourishing cultures and innovation, the marks of humanity. Regardless, literature should never concede to political instrumentalism, so Naipaul, entitled to have his own racist, ahistorical opinion lacking consideration of neocolonialism and other components of Congolese failure, is free to write what he wishes.
What follows below are interesting quotations and notes on the text, including plot and the dismal view of the African continent held by Naipaul:
“Africa was my home, had been the home of my family for centuries. But we came from the east coast, and that made the difference. The coast was not truly African. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean. True Africa was at our back. Many miles of scrub or desert separated us from the up-country people; we looked east to the lands which we traded—Arabia, India, Persia. These were also the lands of our ancestors. But we could no longer say that we were Arabians or Indians or Persians; when we compared ourselves with these people, we felt like people of Africa.”
“My family was Muslim. But we were a special group. We were distinct from the Arabs and other Muslims of the coast; in our customs and attitudes we were closer to the Hindus of north-western India, from which we originally come. When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.”
“I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber.”
(18) “Of that whole period of upheaval in Africa—the expulsion of the Arabs, the expansion of Europe, the parcelling out of the continent—that is the only family story I have. That was the sort of people we were. All that I know of our history and the history of the Indian Ocean I have got from books written by Europeans. If I say that our Arabs in their time were great adventurers and writers; that our sailors gave the Mediterranean the lateen sail that made the discovery of the Americas possible; that an Indian pilot led Vasco da Gama from East Africa to Calicut; that the very word cheque was first used by our Persian merchants; if I say these things it is because I have got them from European books. They formed no part of our knowledge or pride. Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed away, like the scuff-marks of fishermen on the beach outside our town.”
“Once the Arabs had ruled here; then the Europeans had come; now the Europeans were about to go away. But little had changed in the manners or minds of men. The fishermen’s boats on that beach were still painted with large eyes on the bows for good luck; and the fishermen could get very angry, even murderous, if some visitor tried to photograph them—tried to rob them of their souls. People lived as they had always done; there was no break between past and present. All that had happened in the past was washed away; there was always only the present. It was as though, as a result of some disturbance in the heavens, the early morning light was always receding into the darkness, and men lived in a perpetual dawn.”
(19) “In my family’s compounds there were two slave families, and they had been there for at least three generations. The last thing they wanted to hear was that they had to go. Officially these people were only servants. But they wanted it known—to other Africans, and to poor Arabs and Indians—that they were really slaves. It wasn’t that they were proud of slavery as a condition; what they were fierce about was their special connection with a family of repute. They could be very rough with people they considered smaller fry than the family.”
(22) “If the insecurity I felt about our position on the coast was due to my temperament, then little occurred to calm me down. Events in this part of Africa began to move fast. To the north there was a bloody rebellion of an up-country tribe which the British seemed unable to put down; and there were explosions of disobedience and rage in other places as well. Even hypochondriacs sometimes have real illnesses, and I don’t think it was my nervousness alone that made me feel that the whole political system we had known was coming to an end, and that what was going to replace it wasn’t going to be pleasant. I feared the lies—black men assuming the lies of white men.”
“If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were moral. We didn’t lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn’t think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did. But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.”
(26) “Many years before, following some fancy of his own, Nazruddin had cut down on his business on the coast and begun to move inland. The colonial boundaries of Africa gave an international flavour to his operations. But Nazruddin was doing no more than follow the old Arab trading routes to the interior; and he had fetched up in the centre of the continent, at the bend in the great river.”
“That was as far as the Arabs had got in the last century. There they had met Europe, advancing from the other direction. For Europe it was one little probe. For the Arabs of central Africa it was their all; the Arabian energy that had pushed them into Africa had died down at its source, and their power was like the light of a star that travels on after the star itself has become dead. Arab power had vanished; at the bend in the river there had grown up a European, and not an Arab, town. And it was from that town that Nazruddin, reappearing among us from time to time, brought back his exotic manners and tastes and his tales of commercial success.
(29) Nazruddin: “Do you know Uganda? A lovely country. Cool, three to four thousand feet up, and people say it’s like Scotland, with the hills. The British have given the place the finest administration you could ask for. Very simple, very efficient. Wonderful roads. And the Bantu people there are pretty bright.”
(30) “Business never dies in Africa; it is only interrupted.” Nazruddin to Salim
(31) “We had cars and we lived in proper houses—I had bought a flat over an empty warehouse for almost nothing. But if we had worn skins and lived in thatched huts it wouldn’t have been too inappropriate. The shops were empty; water was a problem; electricity was erratic; and petrol was often short.”
(32) “So almost as soon as it had been put up—no doubt with speeches about a further sixty years of service—the steamer monument had been knocked down. With all the other colonial statues and monuments. Pedestals had been defaced, protective railings flattened, floodlights smashed and left to rust. Ruins had been left as ruins; no attempt had been made to tidy up. The names of all the main streets had been changed. Rough boards carried the new, roughly lettered names. No one used the new names, because no one particularly cared about them. The wish had only been to get rid of the old, to wipe out the memory of the intruder. It was unnerving, the depth of that African rage, the wish to destroy, regardless of the consequences.”
(49-50) Salim speaking to Ferdinand before thinking the following: “They! When we wanted to speak politically, when we wanted to abuse or praise politically, we said ‘the Americans’, ‘the Europeans’, ‘the white people’, ‘the Belgians’. When we wanted to speak of the doers and makers and the inventors, we all—whatever our race—said ‘they’. We separated these men from their groups and countries and in this way attached them to ourselves. ‘They’re making cars that will run on water.’ ‘They’re making television sets as small as a matchbox’. The ‘they’ we spoke of in this way were very far away, so far away as to be hardly white. They were impartial, up in the clouds, like good gods. We weaited for their blessings, and showed off those blessings—as I had shown off my cheap binoculars and my fancy camera to Ferdinand—as though we had been responsible for them.”
(53) “Ferdinand could only tell me that the world outside Africa was going down and Africa was rising. When I asked in what way the world outside was going down, he couldn’t say. And when I pushed him past the stage where he could repeat bits of what he had heard at the lycee, I found that the ideas of the school discussion had in his mind become jumbled and simplified. Ideas of the past were confused with ideas of the present. In his lycee blazer, Ferdinand saw himself as evolved and important, as in the colonial days. At the same time he saw himself as a new man of Africa, and important for that reason. Out of this staggering idea of his own importance, he had reduced Africa to himself; and the future of Africa was nothing more than the job he might do later on.”
(58) Hamitic Hypothesis reference and to the Tutsi of Bujumbura later on
“During the course of the term there had come to the lycee some boys from the warrior tribes to the east. They were an immensely tall people; and, as Metty told me with awe, they were used to being carried around on litters by their slaves, who were of a small, squatter race. For these tall men of the forest there had always been European admiration. Ever since I could remember there had been articles about them in the magazines—these Africans who cared nothing about planting or trade and looked down, almost as much as Europeans, on other Africans. This European admiration still existed; articles and photographs continued to appear in magazines, in spite of the changes that had come to Africa. In fact, there were now Africans who felt as the Europeans did, and saw the warrior people as the highest kind of African.”
“I knew other things about the forest kingdom, though. I knew that the slave people were in revolt and were being butchered back into submission. But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away.”
(59) “I began to understand how simple and uncomplicated the world was for me. For people like myself and Mahesh, and the uneducated Greeks and Italians in our town, the world was really quite a simple place. We could understand it, and if too many obstacles weren’t put in our way we could master it. It didn’t matter that we were far away from our civilization, far away from the doers and makers. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t make the things we liked to use, and as individuals were even without the technical skills of primitive people. In fact, the less educated we were, the more at peace we were, the more easily we were carried along by our civilization or civilizations.”
(63) “To talk of trouble was to pretend there were laws and regulations that everyone could acknowledge. Here there was nothing. There had been order once, but that order had had its own dishonesties and cruelties—that was why the town had been wrecked. We lived in that wreckage. Instead of regulations there were now only officials who could always prove you wrong, until you paid up. All that could be said to Ferdinand was: ‘Don’t harm me, boy, because I can do you greater harm.’”
(67) “I listened, and at the end he said with a smile, ‘Semper aliquid novi.’ He had used the lycee motto to make a joke. The words were old, he told me, two thousand years old, and referred to Africa. An ancient Roman writer had written that out of Africa there was ‘always something new’, semper aliquid novi. And when it came to masks and carvings, the words were still literally true. Every carving, every mask, served a specific religious purpose, and could only be made once. Copies were copies; there was no magical feeling or power in them; and in such copies Father Huismans was not interested. He looked in masks and carvings for a religious quality; without that quality the things were dead and without beauty.”
“That was strange, that a Christian priest should have had such regard for African beliefs, to which on the coast we had paid no attention. And yet, though Father Huismans knew so much about African religion and went to such trouble to collect his pieces, I never felt that he was concerned about Africans in any other way; he seemed indifferent to the state of the country. I envied him that indifference; and I thought, after I left him that day, that his Africa, of bush and river, was different from mine. His Africa was a wonderful place, full of new things.”
(69) “There would always have been a settlement at that bend in the river, he said. It was a natural meeting place. The tribes would have changed, power would have shifted, but men would always have returned there to meet and trade. The Arab town would have been only a little more substantial than the African settlements, and technologically not much more advanced. The Arabs, so far in the interior, would have had to build with the products of the forest; life in their town wouldn’t have been much more than a kind of forest life. The Arabs had only prepared the way for the mighty civilization of Europe.”
(76) “Who wanted philosophy or faith for the good times? We could all cope with the good times. It was for the bad that we had to be equipped. And here in Africa none of us were as well equipped as the Africans. The Africans had called up this war; they would suffer dreadfully, more than anybody else; but they could cope. Even the raggedest of them had their villages and tribes, things that were absolutely theirs. They could run away again to their secret worlds and become lost on those worlds, as they had done before. And even if terrible things happened to them they would die with the comfort of knowing that their ancestors were gazing down approvingly of them.”
(86) “The rage of the rebels was like a rage against metal, machinery, wires, everything that was not of the forest and Africa.”
(99) “They wore their uniforms the way Ferdinand had at one time worn his lycee blazer: they saw themselves both as the new men of Africa and the men of the new Africa. They made such play with the national flag and the portrait of the President—the two now always going together—that in the beginning I thought these new officers stood for a new, constructive pride. But they were simpler. The flag and the President’s portrait were only like their fetishes, the sources of their authority. They didn’t see, these young men, that there was anything to build in their country. As far as they were concerned, it was all there already. They had only to take. They believed that, by being what they were, they had earned the right to take; and the higher the officer, the greater the crookedness—if that word had any meaning.”
“With their guns and jeeps, these men were poachers of ivory and thieves of gold. Ivory, gold—add slaves, and it would have been like being back in oldest Africa. And these men would have dealt in slaves, if there was still a market. It was to the traders in the town that the army turned when they wished to clear their gold or, more especially, the ivory they had poached. Officials and governments right across the continent were engaged in this ivory trade which they themselves had declared illegal. It made smuggling easy; but I was nervous of getting involved, because a government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you. Your business associate today can be your jailer or worse tomorrow.”
(107-108) “And then we began to understand that what the President was attempting was so stupendous in his own eyes that even he would not have wanted to proclaim it. He was creating modern Africa. He was creating a miracle that would astound the rest of the world. He was by-passing real Africa, the difficult Africa of bush and villages, and creating something that would match anything that existed in other countries.”
(108) “The President had wished to show us a new Africa. And I saw Africa in a way I had never seen it before, saw the defeats and humiliations which until then I had regarded as just a fact of life. And I felt like that—full of tenderness for the Big Man, for the ragged villagers walking around the Domain, and the soldiers showing them the shabby sights—until some soldier played the fool with me or some official at the customs was difficult, and then I fell into the old way of feeling, the easier attitudes of the foreigners in the bars. Old Africa, which seemed to absorb everything, was simple; this place kept you tense. What a strain it was, picking your way through stupidity and aggressiveness and pride and hurt!”
(127) Cringe moments of intense racism: “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.”
(131) “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 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.”
“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.”
(144-145) Indar on what Raymond said about the President: “’Raymond tells a story well. But a lot of what he says is true. What he says about the President and ideas is certainly true. The President uses them all and somehow makes them work together. He is the great African chief, and he is also the man of the people. He is the modernizer and he is also the African who has rediscovered his African soul. He’s conservative, revolutionary, everything. He’s going back to the old ways, and he’s also the man who’s going ahead, the man who’s going to make the country a world power by the year 2000. I don’t know whether he’s done it accidentally or someone’s been telling him what to do. But the mish-mash works because he keeps on changing, unlike the other guys. He is the soldier who decided to become an old-fashioned chief, and he’s the chief whose mother was a hotel maid. That makes him everything, and he plays up everything. There isn’t anyone in the country who hasn’t heard of that hotel-maid mother.”
(160) Indar explains his outfit: “My idea was this. Everything had conspired to push black Africa into every kind of tyranny. As a result Africa was full of refugees, first-generation intellectuals. Western governments didn’t want to know, and the old Africa hands were in no position to understand—they were still fighting ancient wars. If Africa had a future, it lay with those refugees. My idea was to remove them from the countries where they couldn’t operate and send them, if only for a little while, to those parts of the continent where they could. A continental interchange, to give the men themselves hope, to give Africa the better news about itself, and to make a start on the true African revolution.”
(167) “To Ferdinand the colonial past had vanished. The steamer had always been African, and first class on the steamer was what he could see now. Respectably dressed Africans, the older men in suits, the evolved men of an earlier generation; some women with families, everyone dressed up for the journey; one or two of the old ladies of such families, closer to the ways of the forest, already sitting on the floor of their cabins and preparing lunch, breaking the black hulls of smoked fish and smoked monkeys into enamel plates with coloured patterns, and releasing strong, salty smells.”
“Rustic manners, forest manners, in a setting not of the forest. But that was how, in our ancestral lands, we all began—the prayer mat on the sand, then the marble floor of a mosque; the rituals and taboos of nomads, which, transferred to the palace of a sultan or a maharaja, became the traditions of an aristocracy.”
(174) “But you couldn’t forget where you were. The photograph of the President was about three feet high. The official portraits of the President in African garb were getting bigger and bigger, the quality of the prints finer (they were said to be done in Europe). And once you knew about the meaning of the leopard skin and the symbolism of what was carved on the stick, you were affected; you couldn’t help it. We had all become his people; even here at the Tivoli we were reminded that we all in various ways depended on him.”
(198-199) “It was the opposite of the life of our family and community on the coast. That life was full of rules. Too many rules; it was a pre-packed kind of life. Here I had stripped myself of all the rules. During the rebellion—such a long time ago—I had also discovered that I had stripped myself of the support the rules gave. To think of it like that was to feel myself floating and lost. And I preferred not to think about it—it was too much like the panic you could at any time make yourself feel if you thought hard enough about the physical position of the town in the continent, and your own place in that town.”
(207) “I heard it said that Noimon had sold up only for the sake of his children’s education; it was also said that he had been pressured by his wife (Noimon was rumoured to have a second, half-African family). And then it began to be said that Noimon would regret his decision. Copper was copper, the boom was going to go on, and while the Big Man was in charge everything would keep on running smoothly. Besides, though Australia and Europe and North America were nice places to visit, life there wasn’t as rosy as some people thought—and Noimon, after a lifetime in Africa, was going to find that out pretty soon. We lived better where we were, with servants and swimming pools, luxuries that only millionaires had in those other places.”
(214) “The speech, so far, was like many others the President had made. The themes were not new: sacrifice and the bright future; the dignity of the woman of Africa; the need to strengthen the revolution, unpopular though it was with those black men in the towns who dreamed of waking up one day as white men; the need for Africans to be African, to go back without shame to their democratic and social ways, to rediscover the virtues of the diet and medicines of their grandfathers and not to go running like children after things in imported tins and bottles; the need for vigilance, work, and, above all, discipline.”
(237) “I was in Africa one day; I as in Europe the next morning. It was more than travelling fast. It was like being in two places at once. I woke up in London with little bits of Africa on me—like the airport tax ticket, given me by an official I knew, in the middle of another kind of crowd, in another kind of building, in another climate. Both places were real; both places were unreal. You could play off one against the other; and you had no feeling of having made a final decision, a great last journey. Which, in a way, was what this was for me, though I only had an excursion ticket, a visitor’s visa, and I had to go back within six weeks.”
“The Europe the aeroplane brought me to was not the Europe I had known all my life. When I was a child Europe ruled my world. It had defeated the Arabs in Africa and controlled the interior of the continent. It ruled the coast and all the countries of the Indian Ocean with which we traded; it supplied our goods. We knew who we were and where we had come from. But it was Europe that gave us the descriptive postage stamps that gave us ideas of what as picturesque about ourselves. It also gave us a new language.”
(258) “Portraits, maxims, occasional statues of the African madonna—they continued all the way to the hotel. If I had come to the capital fresh from our town I would have felt choked. But after Europe, and after what I had seen of the country from the air, and still with my sense of the flimsiness of the capital, my attitudes was different, and I was surprised by it. There was to me an element of pathos in those maxims, portraits, and statues, in this wish of a man of the bush to make himself big, and setting about it in such a crude way. I even felt a little sympathy for the man who was making such a display of himself.”
