PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS
NORTH OF SOUTH
Shiva Naipaul was born in 1945 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He was educated at Queen’s Royal College and St Mary’s College in Trinidad and at University College, Oxford. He married in 1967 and had one son. His books include Fireflies (1970), which won the Jock Campbell New Statesman Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and the Winifred Holtby Prize; The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973), which won a Whitbread Literary Award; North of South (1978), the story of his remarkable journey through Africa; Black and White (1980); A Hot Country (1983); and Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth: Stories and Pieces (1984). Many of his books are published in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, including A Man of Mystery and Other Stories (1995), a selection of stories taken from Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth. Shiva Naipaul died in 1985 aged only forty. David Holloway in the Daily Telegraph wrote, ‘We have lost one of the most talented and wide-ranging writers of his generation.’
AN AFRICAN JOURNEY
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Great Britain by André Deutsch Ltd 1978
First published in the United States of America by Simon and Schuster 1979
Published in Penguin Books 1980
17
Copyright © Shiva Naipaul, 1978, 1979
All rights reserved
The author wishes to acknowledge the help he received from the Phoenix Trust while writing this book.
Permission to excerpt from the following is gratefully acknowledged:
“White Christmas” by Irving Berlin; copyright 1940, 1942 by Irving Berlin;
copyright © Irving Berlin, 1968, 1969, reprinted by permission of Irving
Berlin Music Corporation. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen; copyright 1937
by Random House, Inc.; copyright © Rungstedlundfondem, 1965, Which
Tribe Do You Belong To? by Alberto Moravia; translated from the Italian
by Angus Davidson; English translation copyright © Martin Secker
& Warburg Ltd, 1974; reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, Inc.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196197-2
North of South
FOR TARUN
Introduction
Prelude
PART ONE
1. Bright Lights
2. I. Black and White: Old Style
II. Black and White: New Style
3. Between Master and Slave
4. A Highlands Adventure
5. A Spell on the Coast
PART TWO
6. Taking the Socialist Road
7. Three Portraits
8. Animals and Men
9. The Haven of Peace
10. Words, Words, Words
11. Into the Void
An introduction is a temptation: it can turn so easily into a self-justifying exercise, a kind of special pleading in behalf of a book whose nature and purpose might so easily be misunderstood. Especially a book about “Africa”—a subject that, in the ex-imperial West, is labeled “fragile,” “handle with care,” “this side up.” In order to avoid temptation, I will repeat here the letter I wrote to my English publisher when the idea of my undertaking an African journey was first discussed.
“Of course [I wrote] it is impossible to be precise about the end product; and, in any case, I don’t think it would be wise to overcommit myself—if for no other reason than that the kind of book one eventually writes will be determined by the kind of experiences one has actually had. And I wouldn’t care to anticipate what those experiences might be. Still, I shall try to give you some idea of what I have in mind.
“The idea is that I shall travel in East Africa for a period of (say) five or six months, visiting Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. But it is not my intention to write a straightforward travel book; nor do I intend to write a ‘current affairs’ type of book. I won’t be setting out to compete with the journalists.
“The book will arise, I hope, out of my own concerns—or, if you prefer, obsessions. What do terms like ‘liberation,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘socialism,’ actually mean to the people—i.e., the masses—who experience them? For example, in Tanzania, Julius Nyerere has evolved a paternal socialism that he believes reflects—or recreates—all the virtues of traditional African culture. The theory requires that people be moved into villages organized on a cooperative basis. It all looks good on paper, and Nyerere has been much praised. All the same, the attempts to achieve this ideal have involved the burning of crops and homesteads to encourage the reluctant, those who doubt the virtues of ujamaa—familyhood. Certain questions arise. How wide is the gap between the rhetoric of liberation and its day-to-day manifestations? How much cynicism is there? How much apathy? How much sheer incomprehension? How much fantasy? What kind of Marxism is possible in Africa? The answers to such questions cannot, I believe, be found in the abstract speculations of theorists and professional revolutionaries—who often simply don’t see the world in which they live. The answers, I feel, can be found only by experiencing the heat and dust, so to speak, of the countries themselves. Do the people actually care? What are they like as individuals? What is their level of knowledge? Should we despair? Or should we continue to hope?
“Beyond all this—but not entirely unconnected with it—is the relationship of black and white and brown. Very interesting. I would like, for instance, to have a look at the surviving expatriate community in Kenya: the role of white men in independent Black Africa is, to say the least, intriguing. What kind of shadow does the colonial-settler past continue to throw?
“It is possible to go on and on. But I think I have said enough to give you some idea of the kind of book I would like to write—not (to repeat myself) a straightforward travel book or a current affairs book or (God forbid!) a sociological treatise but (almost) a kind of novel, a montage of people, of places, of encounters seen and interpreted in the light of the questions I have outlined above. I would like to believe that it might be read by people who are not interested in Africa, as such; or in politics, as such.”
Since finishing North of South nothing has occurred in Africa that would prompt me to change any of the opinions uttered in it. There has been one event of note—the death of Jomo Kenyatta, the founding father of Kenya. However, the tense of a few passages excepted, his death does not affect anything I have written. Africa goes on.
Shiva Naipaul
November 1978
ODDLY ENOUGH, one of the cheapest ways of getting from London to Nairobi is to travel from Brussels via Kinshasa on Air Zaïre.
“There’s no need to worry,” the travel agent had said when I expressed anxiety at the news that he had booked me a flight on the Congolese national airline. “They have good planes—Boeings—flown by white pilots.”
So Africa began with Air Zaïre. To be more precise, it began in one of the transit lounges at Brussels airport.
“You from Kenya?”
A middle-aged Sikh in a blue turban sat down beside me, his gray-bearded face creased into an ingratiating smile. He had, I knew, been eyeing me with intent for some time. Nervous, unable to stay still for more than a few seconds, he took his British passport out of his pocket and looked at it; he leafed through his yellow-paged booklet of vaccination certificates; he examined his air ticket. I did not want to be infected by his alarm.
“No. I’m not from Kenya.”
“Tanzania?”
I shook my head.
“Uganda?”
I shook my head.
“Mauritius?”
“I come from Trinidad,” I said at last, tiring of the depressing litany of place bred by our Indian diaspora.
“Trinidad… in the West Indies?”
“Yes.”
“Going to Nairobi on business?”
“No.”
“On holiday?”
“Yes. On holiday.” I watched a plane climbing into the sky.
He was silent for a while. Then: “What is it like for Asians where you come from?”
It was one of the questions to which I was to become accustomed.
“Fine.”
“I come from Tanzania. For our people it’s no good.” He spoke in a whisper and, while he spoke, he looked anxiously about him, as if fearing the presence of eavesdropping enemies.
The public-address system crackled into life.
He grasped my arm. “What is it? What are they saying?” He seemed terrified.
“The flight will be delayed an hour.”
He relaxed his grip. He was returning to Tanzania, he said, in the hope of bringing his mother out. But there were problems. There were too many problems. Exit visas, entry visas, foreign-exchange restrictions. It was all too difficult, too complicated. He did not have much hope of success. Still, his mother was his mother. A son always had to try to do his best for his mother. Asians were having a hard time everywhere. Why was that? Why did nobody like Asians? What crimes had they committed? He had heard that even in Canada they were beginning to have a hard time. Soon there would be nowhere to go. The British were making a fuss about giving his mother an entry permit. What harm could an old woman do? To survive these days you had to be either black or white. It was no good being brown. No good at all.
I wanted to get away, put distance between us. Rising abruptly, I walked away from him.
The flight was not going to be crowded. Not that that mattered—the flight from Brussels to Kinshasa was Air Zaïre’s “prestige” run. Cancellation would come about only if President or Madame Mobutu suddenly decided he or she needed a plane. Then anything could happen. But neither the President nor his wife was in Europe at that moment. So there was no danger of the aircraft’s suddenly being commandeered for reasons of state.
Two English girls came and sat down beside me. One—the older—was stocky and buxom and blond. The other was schoolgirlish in appearance and speech. From their conversation I gathered that the former was going out to Nairobi to visit her boyfriend who was in the safari business. Being something of a Kenya expert, she was giving much useful advice to her younger friend. “Africans will go out of their way to help you because you are English,” she said. “In fact, the more English you are, the more they’ll respect you. At least, that’s been my experience. If you’re firm, you’ll be quite safe.” Her disciple listened intently. She was a quick learner—that I could see.
Most of the European passengers were Belgians: expatriates, mainly teachers, heading back to their ex-colony on one-, two- or three-year contracts. I could sense that the mood of Africa, of expatriate existence, was already upon them. A peculiar, self-absorbed remoteness seemed to envelop them the moment they stepped into the neither-nor world of the transit lounge. They shed their individuality, assuming the collective, abstract identity of a people set apart, a people under siege. The women, locked away behind dark glasses, read magazines or fussed with their children; the men smoked and guarded their gaily colored plastic bags packed with duty-free goods. They were not sahibs and memsahibs. They were their withdrawn successors, neutral and untouchable. Africa held no risks for them. They were supremely disinterested, supremely irresponsible. Africa would help to pay the mortgage. That was all.
The man tapped the camera that was hung around his neck.
“You like?”
He was elegantly dressed in a gray suit, part of a contingent of equally well-attired blacks, all equipped with technological trophies—transistor radios, portable television sets, cassette tape recorders and the like—acquired in the duty-free shops. They had appeared in the lounge about fifteen minutes before, talking noisily and excitedly comparing their buys. The irruption had provoked muted, sardonic comment among the expatriates.
“I like,” I replied.
“A very good camera. Very expensive. Japanese.” He rested a finger on the trademark. It was a Nikon.
But it was not the camera that drew my attention: it was the metal badge, pinned to his lapel, showing the benign, bespectacled countenance of President Mobutu. The rest of the contingent, I noticed, were similarly adorned.
He saw me looking at the badge.
“That is our President. You like?”
“I like.”
He fondled the badge. “A very historical man. A great leader not only of Zaïre but of Africa. A liberator of humanity.”
(Some weeks later I was told a joke by a German adventurer resident in Mombasa. In downtown Kinshasa there is a traffic circle. In the middle of the traffic circle is displayed a gigantic photograph of Mobutu. Question: What is the difference between the photograph and the man himself? Answer: The photograph has been developed.)
“You would like me to take a picture of you?”
“Of me? No… no… .” My gaze strayed toward the other members of the contingent. “Have you been touring Europe?”
“We have been in Washington. We are a financial delegation.”
I examined him more closely. He was extremely young: barely, I thought, into his twenties. His face was smooth and shapely, full of eager, coltish curiosity.
“Please let me take a picture of you.”
Again I declined the offer. “Tell me about Washington.”
“Washington?” He was absorbed in his exploration of the camera. “We were discussing finance. It was a conference. In Washington there were many good things to buy. I liked it.”
“What aspects of finance were you discussing? Foreign aid? Loans?”
He looked at me assessingly. “That I cannot tell you. That is a secret.” He was apologetic; he wanted to please.
“Are you by chance the Minister of Finance?”
He smiled. “I am a financial adviser. We are all financial advisers.” His arms swept out embracingly toward his friends.
“You seem very young.”
“Our President believes in youth. Please let me take a picture of you….”
I continued to refuse. Losing interest, he wandered away from me. The other financial advisers were busy with their toys. They had been “discussing finance” in Washington! I studied the expatriates. They were more remote, more self-contained than ever. They accepted no responsibility for the charade being enacted around them. None of our business, they seemed to be saying. None of our business.
The public-address system crackled. Someone grabbed my arm. It was the Sikh.
“What is it saying?”
“It is saying we must board the aircraft now.”
The NO SMOKING, FASTEN SEAT BELT signs were ignored by the financial advisers, who, as the plane taxied along the runway, strolled with proprietorial ease up and down the aisle. Out of the mouth of one, strange to say, protruded an electric toothbrush. They took off their jackets, loosened their ties. There was a great deal of loud laughter. Music played. The plump, steatopygous stewardesses distributed hard candies. (Earlier, they had given a most unconvincing demonstration of emergency procedures.) They too displayed Mobutu badges, pinned to their sarong-style uniforms. The atmosphere was so like that of a country bus that I half-expected to see goats and chickens tethered to the seats.
We were in the air, Brussels slanting away beneath us. A heavily bearded expatriate was sitting across the aisle from me. Our eyes met; he shrugged.
“It is always like this,” he said. “But soon they will be quiet. Soon they will drink whisky and fall asleep.” He rested his head on his palm and closed his eyes.
“You fly Air Zaïre often?”
“It is cheap.”
He taught French in a primary school in Lubumbashi. He was on his third contract.
“You must like it there,” I said.
“I have no complaints. Since Independence it is very good for us.”
I tried to look surprised.
“It is true,” he said warmly. “Where would they be without us? They need us. We are indispensable.” He pronounced “indispensable” French style. “Without us they would still be swinging from the trees.”
Far below us, like a quilt spread over the body of the earth, lay the ordered fields of Europe, safe, serene, blessed.
In the early dawn I felt ill. We were flying low over featureless bush country, still indistinct in the pink-washed half-light. My ears were blocked, muting the whine of the engines to such a degree that, for the most part, we seemed to be floating in eerie silence over the gray desolation that was my first sight of Africa. We should have touched down in Kinshasa some hours before, but the flight had been delayed first in Rome, then in Beirut.
My head swam. I rang for the stewardess. Nothing happened. I rang again. Some minutes later she came, bad-temperedly rubbing the sleep from her eyes. I asked for some coffee. She went away without a word of acknowledgment. The financial advisers were awake, walking up and down the aisle, occupying the lavatories. No coffee came. We floated lower, falling toward the violet-colored land whose inconsequential detail was now beginning to stand out with greater clarity. Rectangles of wan blue light appeared below us; the engines whined suddenly louder as we dropped sharply and the ground rushed up to meet us. Long before the aircraft had come to a halt the financial advisers were thronging the approaches to the exit.
At the foot of the stairs, the teacher bound for Lubumbashi tapped me on the shoulder. We shook hands and wished each other the best of luck. He turned and strode quickly away from me across the tarmac. The Sikh sidled up beside me. He looked more alarmed than ever.
“This is a bad place,” he whispered. “A very, very bad place.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know. I have heard many stories about this place.” He gazed at me with dilated eyes. “Here they rob you and cheat you without mercy. Here they do not have law. They will take the clothes from off your back. They are very, very bad men.”
At this hour of the morning there was no food or drink of any kind to be had. Only a down-at-heel stall selling beads, basketry and crudely carved animal and human figures was open for business. Having nothing better to do, I went over to have a look. My presence galvanized the dozing attendant. He reached under the counter and brought out two ponderous human figures. One was of a warrior in a loincloth holding a spear; the other was an amply proportioned steatopygous girl.
“You want man?”
“No.”
Without more ado, he returned the warrior under the counter.
“How about girl? You want girl?”
“No.”
With inane lasciviousness, he began to caress the pear-shaped wooden breasts. He adopted the wheedling tone of the professional pimp. “You don’t like African girl? Very nice. Very cheap. Only one hundred dollars American.”
“I don’t have one hundred dollars American.”
“I give you for fifty dollars American. Bargain price.” He giggled, continuing to stroke and caress the wooden breasts. “No?”
“No.”
He returned the girl under the counter and brought out an elephant. “Only twenty-five dollars American,” he said. “Look.” He turned it upside down and pointed to its genital region—or what I assumed would be the genital region of an elephant. “Girl elephant.” He giggled.
Was he drunk? Drugged? Mad? I shook my head. He returned the elephant to its place under the counter and moved morosely away to the farther end of the stall, refusing to have anything more to do with me. I saw the Sikh heading toward me, wringing his hands. He was moving with difficulty; he seemed to be in great pain.
“This is terrible! Terrible!”
“What is terrible?”
“I cannot go to the toilet without a visa.” He was crumpled with despair.
“Who told you that?”
He pointed to the two armed sentries who were guarding the exit leading to the nontransit zone. “They told me. When I begged them to let me through to go to the toilet they asked me if I had a visa to enter Zaïre. What is the world coming to? They give us Asians a hard time everywhere. They said they would only let me through if I deposited money with them. It is terrible. I’m not a young man anymore. I can’t hold my water as I used to.”
“But there is a toilet in here. You don’t have to go out anywhere.”
He stared at me incredulously. I showed him the sign. He clutched my arm—and was gone.
A number of new passengers—perhaps a dozen—had made their appearance. The two English girls sat side by side on one of the wooden benches scattered about the hall. The younger—the disciple—was reading Robert Ruark’s novel Uhuru. A leather traveling case lay open on the lap of her buxom companion. She was grooming herself, grimacing into the mirror attached to its lid. A public rather than a private performance, it invited voyeurism. The two sentries—they who had demanded a visa of the Sikh—watched with sullen interest.
The morning was dismal, promising rain. At the entrance to the building stood an African girl in traditional dress, a baby strapped to her back. She stood there, perfectly immobile, looking out across the tarmac toward the bush country. Her hair, plaited into tiny pigtails, projected stiffly from her scalp—like antennae. Her spectral anonymity was faintly disturbing. When next I looked, she had disappeared.
A soft drizzle was falling when the connecting flight to Nairobi was called.
Central Africa was, for the most part, hidden under cloud. Occasionally, though, the cloud cover frayed to reveal, far below, unremarkable olive-green plains crisscrossed by winding tracks; or ranges of hills—at this height mere corrugations of light and shadow; or the brown loop of a nameless river. Then the clouds would close in again.
It was nearly midday when we landed at Bujumbura, in Burundi. We would, in normal circumstances, have flown to Entebbe, but not many planes went there nowadays. We were ordered off the aircraft and herded onto the veranda of the wooden bungalow that served as the air terminal. The equatorial sunshine was dazzling. Insects hummed among the beds of bright flowers. The terminal had the tranquil air of a rural railway station rarely patronized. In the little bar beyond the veranda I bought a beer. Soldiers lounged in doorways. The room was graced by a photograph of the local dictator, Micombero, in military uniform. His handsome face was unsmiling. The caption below the photograph proclaimed this frightening individual the Savior and Father of his people. Those, however, were the halcyon days: Micombero has since been overthrown and the people of Burundi blessed with a new Savior and a new Father. I do not know who he is.
“This place gives me the creeps,” the buxom English girl said in a low voice.
“There have been massacres and things here, haven’t there?” Her disciple, sipping a yellow drink, stared at the photograph. “Or am I thinking of Ruanda?” She frowned thoughtfully.
“Both Ruanda and Burundi have had their massacres,” her guru said.
The disciple shuddered.
“Mind you,” her guru added, “they only kill each other as a rule. They never touch Europeans—or hardly ever.”
“In Burundi do the tall ones kill the short ones or the short ones kill the tall ones? I know Burundi does one thing and Ruanda the other.”
“I’m never sure myself,” her guru said.
Her disciple sighed. “I find African politics so very confusing.” She smiled charmingly at the barman. He did not return the courtesy. She nudged the guru. “Is he a tall one or a short one?”
“I’m not sure, to be honest.”
Her disciple sighed again. “I wished we’d stopped at Entebbe instead. That would have been so much more exciting….”
Panic-stricken fingers tightened around my arm. “Did I hear her say we are going to Entebbe?”
I had not realized the Sikh was lurking behind me.
“Yes,” I said cruelly.
Through a break in the clouds Lake Victoria flashed blue. Then—magically—we were out of the clouds and sailing in sunshine, the uplands of East Africa spread out below us. We crossed the Rift Valley, a hallucinatory fusion of earth and light and space. Our journey was almost over.
The Sikh did not know that “British citizens of Asian origin” needed a visa to enter Kenya.
“Always visa. Wherever I go it’s visa this and visa that. What is a man to do?” He wrung his hands. “What is wrong with my passport? A British citizen is a British citizen.”
The Immigration Officer remained unmoved. “Stand aside, bwana. You’re holding up the queue.”
The two English girls were next in line. He glanced cursorily at their passports. They were stamped and returned with a smile. “Enjoy your stay and welcome to Kenya.”
Beaming, the buxom girl swept through the barrier, chased by an approving leer.
“Please tell me why I need a visa, bwana.” The Sikh was back again. “My passport is British like theirs—is it not?”
“Do as I told you, bwana. Stand aside.” He looked vaguely threatening. “Don’t make even more trouble for yourself.”
It was my turn. I did not need a visa, being a citizen not of the United Kingdom but of Trinidad and Tobago. He worked through my passport carefully, page by page. “Where’s your visa?”
I said the Kenya High Commission in London had told me that I would not need one.
“They told you that, did they?” He squinted at me. “Is Trinidad and Tobago a member of the Commonwealth?”
“It is.”
Again he squinted at me. He consulted a booklet. “You’re right,” he said, as if surprised to confirm the truth of what I had told him. He studied me. “You were born there?”
“I was.”
He stamped my passport. “Now, bwana, let’s discuss your little problem.” He beckoned over the Sikh.
I lingered, wanting to see what would happen. The officer shooed me away. I went through to collect my luggage.
Ten minutes later the Sikh joined me.
“You made it!”
We watched the baggage belt rotate. The Sikh muttered under his breath.
“You must have been very persuasive,” I said.
“He’s a Kikuyu. I knew what I had to do. They will sell their grandmothers to you if you give them a chance.”
“Well,” I said cheerfully, “he let you in—that’s the main thing.”
The belt ceased its clattering rotation. My luggage had not come off the plane. Nor had the Sikh’s. The Sikh groaned and put his hands to his head.
The Customs Officer looked at his gold watch.
“Our baggage hasn’t come off the plane,” I said.
The officer called over a khaki-clad official. “They say their luggage hasn’t come off the plane.”
“That is not our responsibility,” the khaki-clad man said.
“Whose responsibility is it?”
“It is the airline’s responsibility,” the khaki-clad official said. “What airline did you come by?”
“Air Zaïre.”
He looked at me pityingly. “That is bad,” he said, “very bad.”
The Sikh groaned louder.
“Very bad,” the first official confirmed. “You may as well forget all about it.”
“How can I forget about it?” The Sikh waved his arms about. “Am I to walk the streets naked?”
“You can buy new clothes,” the khaki-clad man said. “You Asians are rich people.” However, he went away and returned with two forms. “You can fill these in if you want to,” he said. “But it won’t guarantee you anything. It is important to remember that it is not an admission of liability.”
“Guarantees you nothing,” the first official emphasized, gazing fondly at his watch. It must have been a very recent acquisition.
I filled in my form and helped the Sikh to fill in his. It took a long time—the Sikh went into meticulous descriptive detail. The khaki-clad man signed both forms with a happy flourish.
“Remember, it is not an admission of liability. It’s just for the record.”
The Sikh and I shared the cost of a taxi into Nairobi. I got off at one of the downtown hotels.
“You know,” he said, clasping my hands in his, “I just remembered something.”
“What?”
“I think I had eight pairs of underpants. Not seven.”
A week later my suitcase (it had been left behind in Kinshasa) did—miraculously—turn up, minus my transistor radio and a number of lesser items.
IT WAS midmorning, and the open-air pavement terrace attached to the New Stanley Hotel was crowded with tourists dressed for Africa. Bush shirts and sun hats banded with leopard skin of synthetic garishness were everywhere in evidence. Cameras and binoculars dangled from sun-tanned necks. German, French and American voices rang in the air. Out on the street was parked a convoy of zebra-striped Volkswagen vans. The smell of safari—of tented bush, of elephant, of hippopotamus, of lion—suffused the bright morning. Noisy traffic choked the broad expanse of Kenyatta Avenue. Fashionably dressed blacks streamed along the pavements, the men carrying briefcases, the women swinging handbags. Nairobi vibrated with cosmopolitan splendor. A crippled beggar, his knees padded with foam rubber, his hands encased in sandals, crawled nimbly on the periphery of the terrace. “Jambo… jambo…” The waiters, smartly dressed in white-and-green tunics, kept him at bay. A thorn tree, rising centrally from the terrace, threw a dappled green shade across the metal tables.
Without asking if they could, two Americans came over and sat down at my table. They were an oddly contrasting pair. One was well over six feet tall, slope-shouldered and concave-stomached. His hair, frizzled and teased out in “Afro” style, formed a dark, woolly halo; his skin, bronzed and toughened by exposure to the sun, was leathery in appearance. The other was at least six inches shorter and anemically white. He had lank, shoulder-length hair. His pale blue eyes, unfocused and restless, hinted at a kind of semi-idiocy. The tall one produced a roll of cigarette paper and a packet of loose tobacco.
“Got any stuff on you, Stan?” The idiot boy drummed his ivory-colored fingers on the table.
“No,” Stan said, carefully sprinkling tobacco down the length of the paper. “And even if I had I wouldn’t let you score off me. You smoke too damned much, Andy.”
“I feel awful, Stan.” Andy’s parted lips drooled as he watched Stan manipulate the tobacco.
“I’m not surprised,” Stan said. “What sort of crap were you on last night?”
“They were only mandies, Stan.”
“You’ll kill yourself one of these days,” Stan said. “But I’m not going to pay your funeral expenses.” He ran his tongue down the edges of the paper and sealed the tube. “Why do you do it? Why do you feed yourself all that shit?”
“I get bored easily, Stan. I need a lift….” He waved at two black girls. They came over. They sat down.
Stan lit the cigarette. He put his arm around the neck of the girl sitting next to him. “Why aren’t you out and about looking for work, sweetie?”
“I want a beer,” she said, pouting petulantly. “I’m tired.” She was a strange-looking creature. The lobe of her right ear was missing—it looked as if it had been bitten off; her knees were patterned with blotched pink patches; a scar crossed one of her cheeks diagonally.
“Beer makes you fat, sweetie. It’s bad for business. I don’t get turned on by fat chicks. Not even by fat black chicks.” He pulled her truncated ear. She scowled, shaking off his embrace, and snapped her fingers at a passing waiter. She ordered two beers.
“I’m not paying for two beers,” Stan said.
“I’ll pay for my own,” the other girl said. Disdainfully, she flung a handful of coins on the table. She muttered something. Both girls laughed.
“What did she say?” Stan asked.
“Nothing.”
Stan grabbed her wrist. “I want to know.”
“She said that mzungus [white people] are all the same.”
“Where’d you pick them up?” Stan asked Andy.
“She’s a friend,” Andy said. “I got lots of friends.”
“Yeah….”
“I got lots of friends,” Andy said. “Lots and lots of friends.” His eyes roamed the terrace. “Everywhere I go I make friends.…”
But Stan was not listening. He was looking speculatively at me.
“From distant parts?”
I nodded.
“What kind of currency are you carrying?”
I told him.
He clucked his tongue. “Sterling… that’s not so good. Still, I could give you eighteen shillings to the pound.”
I said I preferred to change my money legally.
He laughed. “Hear that, Andy? The guy says he prefers to change his money legally.”
“The guy’s a sucker,” Andy said.
Stan leaned toward me. “How about a woman?”
“Not now, thanks.”
“A boy?”
“You deal in those too?”
“I deal in most things—currency, dope, women, boys. I’ll fix you up with anything you want. You could say I’m one of the pillars of the tourist trade in these parts.”
“They allow you a work permit for that?”
Stan’s laughter echoed across the terrace. “Hear that, Andy? The guy wants to know if we have work permits.”
Even the girls were amused.
“We’ve got friends,” Andy said. “We’ve got lots and lots of friends. When you got lots of friends like we have you don’t need a work permit.”
“In a place like this,” Stan said, “you can get away with murder if you know the right people. Money talks in this country.”
“Lots of friends,” Andy said. “We’ve got lots and lots of friends.”
“Business must be good.”
“Booming,” Stan said. “The only comparison is Jo’burg. Nairobi is the finest city north of South.”
Ben wakes at dawn. His neighbor is playing his Grundig stereo at full volume. Automatically, Ben turns on his transistor radio. Lying naked beside him is his mistress, Wini. Her money enables them to go to downtown cafés and drink espresso coffee. Wini has recently risen out of whoredom and climbed a rung or two up the urban ladder. She is now secretary to a white man. Thus, her instinctive harlotry has been sublimated. Ben, dishonorably discharged from the Army, works as a casual laborer on a building site. Wini has rescued him from a life “… of hungriness… hopelessly drunken nights… .” Ben rises, takes a cake of Lux soap and goes to have a bath. The stinking courtyard of the tenement is strewn with junk—a wheelless tricycle, an abandoned shoe, beer bottles, a broken chair, upturned garbage cans. All the wrack of hopeless urban existence. The communal bathroom is no better. “The floor was littered with broken bits of soap, scrubbing rags, stones, cigarette filters and general trash… slimy green fungus grew on the outer edges of the floor and spread some way up the walls. A woman’s bloodstained underpants hung on the nail behind the door… .”
After breakfasting on bread and coffee, he sets out for work on foot, joining the lumpen proletarian hordes heading into the city. “They walked slowly, quietly, their slow tortured boots kneading the mud and shit on the path.” At the building site, the day’s frenzied mechanical activities have begun. Clouds of choking cement dust rise from the concrete mixers, pickup trucks unload their consignments of sand and gravel, buckets attached to steel cables plummet through the air. Ben reports to the register clerk. The man is “hung up and dishevelled.”
“ ‘Name?’ he croaked.
“ ‘Ben.’
“ ‘Ground duties today, Ben.’
“ ‘Ground, my arse. Check again.’ ”
But ground duties it is. At lunchtime Ben risks his life crossing the streets. The motorists “… have made it a ritual to butcher one or two pedestrians every week as a sacrifice to the Highway Gods.” He patronizes a workingmen’s hostelry where he is served tea in a can that formerly contained Esso motor oil. The stale slices of bread he buys are wrapped in sheets of newspaper. Late in the afternoon he sets off home with a friend. “The empty roads lie wet and cold. The neon lights blink weakly through the streets….” They stop for a drink. “Distorted music, rowdy talk and the smell of beer, cigarettes and vomit spill out into the dimly lit street…. A haze of foul smoke hovers ghost-like under the low ceiling.” The whores buzz about the tables like flies. Ben drinks until drunk. He lurches home to his mistress, her neglected, urine-soaked child and the room that is overrun by cockroaches.
Meja Mwangi is a young Kenyan novelist, a contributor to what his publishers call “the new wave of East African writing.” Ben is the “anti-hero” of his novel Going Down River Road, which was published in 1976. I have chosen to write about it not because it is a particularly good novel (its tough-guy realism is forced and tedious) but because of the picture, the sociological portrait, it offers of African urban man. As presented, Ben is not merely detribalized but drained clean of any memory of tribal existence. Its obligations and sensibilities, its rituals and routines—these are all utterly alien to him. Ben is the sum total of his lusts for food, for drink, for sex and for money. He grows up out of the city streets as naturally as parking meters sprout from its pavements. Transistor radios, stereo systems, jukeboxes, cement mixers and pickup trucks are the artifacts of his world, and he accepts them without question. Forty years ago, Karen Blixen could write: “The Natives were Africa in flesh and blood. The tall extinct volcano of Longonot that rises above the Rift Valley, the broad Mimosa trees along the rivers, the Elephant and the Giraffe, were not more truly Africa than the natives were.”
Ben, on the face of it, has traveled awfully far awfully fast. His world is relentlessly urban; his city is universal. The unswept streets, the smoke-filled bars, the cafés serving espresso coffee, the whores, the pestilential tenements and shantytowns are the props of that vast megalopolis thrown up by industrial civilization. Ben is as bereft of “roots,” of “identity,” as any of his slave-descended American and West Indian brothers. He could be in New York; in Kingston, Jamaica; in Rio de Janeiro; in Soweto. When Wini, his mistress, empties her handbag, there fall out of it “a flimsy pair of knickers, cans of face powder, tubes of creams… a packet of aspirins.” Ben’s imagery is supplied by the machine world, not by elephants and giraffes and Mimosa trees. When he makes love, his mind whirls “like an electric fan.” Wini, wriggling toward climax under him, “was no dynamite. She was a neatly bound bomb. She exploded.” A comrade’s thin legs resemble “a couple of old parking meters.” Men are “guys”; women are “chicks” and “babies.” This is how Mwangi renders the encounter between Ben and a bar girl:
“ ‘Hello darling,’ a large heavy-duty wrapped her hand round Ben’s.
“ ‘Hi!’ he released himself.
“ ‘You have been lost,’ she sang.
“ ‘Not me baby. Money.’
“There was no place to sit. She followed him to the juke box. He leaned on it.
“ ‘Where have you been?’ she asked.
“ ‘Just around.’ ”
The language is cool, vaguely hip. But do people actually talk like that? According to Mwangi, in Nairobi they do, and we must take his word for it. He himself uses that kind of language. He dedicates his book “to the guys [my italics] who introduced me to Ben” and thanks other friends for the “sweet inspiration” they have given him. Despite the horrors which Mwangi parades before us, what is really being asserted, really being celebrated, is Ben’s modernity. But is Going Down River Road any more authentic, any less fabricated than those numerous idylls (which, until not long ago, formed the stock-in-trade of African fiction) describing the noble simplicity of tribal ways and the corruptions introduced by the evil White Man? Is megalopolitan Ben everything his creator claims for him? It is so easy to be taken in by appearances. At night, looking out at the illuminated skyscrapers and cars and flashing neon signs, I was all but taken in.
How recent it is. How startlingly recent! A century ago, city life in East Africa was confined to the Islamicized, Swahili-speaking coast—to towns like Mombasa, Malindi (flourishing kingdoms when Vasco da Gama visited them at the end of the fifteenth century) and Lamu. But these towns belonged to the relatively sophisticated trading arena of the Indian Ocean and were only marginally of Africa. Up-country tribes, like the Kikuyu, living in scattered homesteads, knew nothing of urban life. Even as late as the Mau Mau emergency, the pattern persisted. For purely military purposes, a compulsory “villagization” program was adopted. Elspeth Huxley, writing in 1955, could foresee some unintended good arising out of this measure: she believed it would speed up the rate of Kikuyu cultural advance.
At the turn of the century, Nairobi could hardly be said to exist. In 1913 it consisted of little more than the railroad, a network of dusty lanes, a hotel or two and the ramshackle Indian bazaar. It was in that pre-War year that Elspeth Huxley, then a child, set out in an ox-driven cart from the Norfolk Hotel on the two-day journey to Thika—now almost a satellite town of Nairobi—where her father had just acquired five hundred acres of virgin bush (“thousands of years of untapped fertility locked up in the soil,” the vendor, who sported an Old Etonian tie, had told him) on a ninety-nine-year lease. Thika was then no more than “a name on the map where two rivers joined.…” Beyond it there were “mountains and forests no one had mapped and tribes whose languages no one could speak.”
A mile or two beyond the Norfolk Hotel the wilderness began. Herds of giraffes and zebras and gazelles grazed on the dusty plain dotted with thorn trees. They kept a sharp lookout for lions. Itinerant Kikuyu (today’s “guys” and “chicks”) trudged along the cart track. The bare-breasted, shaven-headed women were doubled up under their burdens; but the young braves, “… their locks embellished with sheep’s fat and red ochre…,” draped in red and black blankets, were a picturesque sight. Juma, the Swahili servant, was full of contempt for these people of the bush, believing them to be cannibals, devilish people whose women gave birth to snakes and lizards.
Thika had a small hotel and a number of Indian dukas (small shops). On all sides Africa stretched away into wild infinity, a continent of undefined threat and mystery. Having land was one thing. Having the labor to work it, quite another. Not far away was a Kikuyu reserve which was rumored to be stocked with “a great supply of able-bodied young men who did nothing all day but grease their limbs and plait their pig-tails.” They were the obvious solution to the labor problem. How were they to be tempted out of the reserve to assist in the task of civilization? Huxley’s father resorted to his old phonograph, working not so much on the assumption that music soothes the savage breast but on the more down-to-earth conviction that the noises it produced would lure them “as a light attracts insects.” Over and over again he played “The Bluebells of Scotland” and “The Lost Chord.” The natives, alas, held aloof.
A neighboring settler, Irish and resourceful, suggested a more literal application of the light-insect analogy. He advised them to hang a safari lamp on a pole. The Kikuyu, he assured them, would never have seen such a thing before. Once they had overcome the idea that there was a spirit locked up within the glass, they would not be able to resist a closer inspection of the marvel. They did as he suggested. For two nights nothing happened. The third night, however, brought success. A number of Kikuyu braves materialized out of the darkness. Not daring to approach too close to the strange object hanging on the pole, they lurked apprehensively on the outer edges of the circle of light, poised for flight should the need arise. They wanted to know if the light was a fragment of a star fallen to earth. When the lamp was brought forward for their closer inspection, they took fright and ran away. However, they returned the following night and behaved more courageously. Eventually, they grew bold enough to touch it, one of them burning his hands on the glass. The lamp was offered to them as a present. They were reluctant to take it, believing that its genie would obey only Europeans.
At the construction site, Ben is working on a skyscraper. Sixty years before, at Thika, the Kikuyu labor force had balked at having to build a rectangular grass hut. Their own dwellings were circular, had always been circular. Geometrical regularities filled them with superstitious dread; they seemed quite unable, for instance, to plow in straight lines—a failing that led the Huxleys to speculate on the relationship between geometrical regularity and civilization. The complaint is echoed even today. It was echoed by the entrepreneur I met in Nairobi. His engineering firm had been awarded a contract by one of the major state-owned organizations. To begin with, he had had an Asian work force. The job had been completed in record time; the workmanship was of a high standard; his firm was showered with praise. But then had come the first expulsions of the Asians. To keep in line with the policy of Kenyanization, he was compelled to employ Africans in their place.
“You can take it from me that Africans don’t understand about straight lines. They just don’t seem able to grasp the concept of a straight line.” Metal plates were bent and twisted one on top of another; every screw was awry. “You must understand that these weren’t people I had picked up off the street. They were qualified. They could show you their certificates.” He had himself physically completed the job, working day and night in order to meet the deadline. “Look at me. I am not a young man. My hair is gray. They wanted to give me another contract. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, ‘but you can keep your contract. I’ve had enough. I want to lead a quieter life. You can get in touch with my competitors.’ ” He smiled ruefully. “The only thing to do with Africans is give them a nice chair, give them a nice-sounding title to go with it and put them where they can do least harm.” He spread his arms resignedly. “One must be realistic. It’s no good living in cloud-cuckoo land. Most of them are less than a generation removed from the bush. What else can you expect?” Beyond the windows of the restaurant where we were sitting, the lights of Nairobi twinkled with Manhat-tanesque self-assurance; Mercedes-Benzes roamed the broad expanses of Kenyatta Avenue; short-skirted whores, pretending to window-shop, peered at the rich displays in bright shop windows.
Stories of African conceptual incapacity have acquired something of the abstract quality of fable. There is a famous one about wheelbarrows. Several versions of the story exist, but the moral is always the same. The version I heard went like this. Some Africans are building a road. Their European adviser watches them running to and fro carrying basketfuls of stone on their heads. They are quickly exhausted and have to take frequent rests. He goes away and returns with a wheelbarrow. He explains its advantages. Dozens of wheelbarrows are supplied. Some days later his foreman comes to him in a state of great agitation. The workers, he reports, are on the verge of physical collapse. Naturally enough, the European adviser is astonished. He rushes off to the site to see what has been happening. And what does he find when he gets there? He finds that the African workers have been trying to carry the fully loaded wheelbarrows on their heads. Get that? On their heads! Imagine all those darkies (they never managed to invent the wheel, you know) loading the wheelbarrows, lifting them up and… and…. There follows explosion after explosion of helpless laughter. The story is clearly apocryphal. (I have seen many Africans handling wheelbarrows in a perfectly normal manner.) Nevertheless, certain other stories, not apocryphal, occasionally do make one pause—like that (reported in The Nation) which told the sad tale of three African workers who had incinerated themselves while trying to weld a tank that was full of gasoline.
The European I was with at the time burst out laughing when he read the report. “I’d have given anything to be there when it happened,” he said. “Can you imagine how they must have shouted and hollered and rolled their eyes? Absolutely priceless.”
The change in their relationship is unfair to both black and white. It breeds stress. This stress nourishes the impotent and puerile racism that feeds on the cycle of tales detailing native ineptitude. Hence the temptation to ignore the underlying issue and to dismiss all