A Bend in the River V.S. Naipaul

1997 Modern Library Edition

Biographical note copyright © 1997 by Random House, Inc.

Copyright © 1979, 1997 by V S. Naipaul

Introduction copyright © 1997 by Elizabeth Hardwick

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by

Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada

by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

This work was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in hardcover and in slightly different form in 1979.

Modern Library and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Jacket photograph courtesy of Frederic Reglain/Gamma Liaison

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932-A bend in the river/V S. Naipaul.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-679-60267-4 1. East Indians — Africa — Fiction. I. Tide.

PR9272.9.N32B4 1997 823'.914 — dc21 96-52567

Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, one of the most highly acclaimed writers in the English language today, was born in Trinidad to Indian parents on August 17, 1932. His grandfather was a Hindu from northern India who migrated to the Caribbean as an indentured laborer; his father was a journalist who inspired the young Naipaul in his future vocation. “At really quite an early age I thought of myself as a writer . . . because of this overwhelming idea of its nobility as a calling,” he remembers. In 1938 the family settled in Port of Spain, where Naipaul attended the island’s leading primary and secondary schools. At the age of eighteen he immigrated to England with a scholarship to University College, Oxford. After earning a degree in English literature in 1953 he moved to London to edit Caribbean Voices, a BBC radio program broadcast to the West Indies.

Naipaul’s writing career began auspiciously with the publication of The Mystic Masseur in 1957. A picaresque novel about an engaging con man who becomes a respected Trinidadian statesman, the book was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) and Miguel Street (1959), a collection of short stories that won the Somerset Maugham Award, also exposed the follies of West Indian society.

The appearance of A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), a tragicomic novel reminiscent of Dickens, marked a turning point in Naipaul’s work. Widely regarded as his masterpiece, the book is a fictionalized account of his father’s life that doubles as an allegory of the colonial predicament. Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (1963), his first novel to be set in England, earned him the Hawthornden Prize.

Naipaul began his series of studies of the emerging nations of the postcolonial world with The Middle Passage (1962). Cast in the form of a travelogue, the book records impressions of British, French, and Dutch societies in the West Indies and South America. Following a year-long journey to India, he wrote An Area of Darkness (1964), a controversial portrayal of his ancestral homeland.

Afterward Naipaul alternated between fiction and nonfiction in his exploration of cultural identity. In 1967 he brought out The Mimic Men, a powerful novel about the consequences of British imperialism that earned him the W. H. Smith Award, and A Flag on the Island, a second collection of short stories. Next he searched out the origins of modern Trinidad in a highly personal history, The Loss of El Dorado (1969). In a Free State, an innovative work about British expatriates in a strife-torn African nation, won England’s prestigious Booker Prize in 1971. The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles, a compilation of personal and political journalism, came out the following year.

The publication of Guerrillas (1975), a haunting novel of murder and revolution on a Caribbean island recently liberated from colonial rule, firmly established Naipaul’s reputation in the United States. After revisiting India during the state of emergency in 1975, he offered another unsettling look at the subcontinent in India: A Wounded Civilization (1977). In 1979 he published A Bend in the River, a profound novel that delves still deeper into his recurring theme of displacement in a neocolonial world.

During the 1980s Naipaul focused mainly on nonfiction. He turned out a compendium of essays, The Return of Eva Peron, with the Killings in Trinidad (1980); Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981), a searching examination of the Islamic revival in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia; and Finding the Center Two Narratives (1984), an autobiographical essay and an essay on the Ivory Coast. The Enigma of Arrival (1987), his only novel of the decade, is perhaps his most autobiographical. In addition he wrote A Turn in the South (1989), a journal of his travels through the American South.

He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990; the same year he published India: A Million Mutinies Now, a more optimistic vision of the modern-day nation. In 1993 he won the David Cohen British Literature Prize. Naipaul’s most recent novel, A Way in the World (1994), is an inventive mixture of autobiography and meditation, a monumental tale of identity recovered.

“For sheer abundance of talent there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V. S. Naipaul,” hailed The New York Times Book Review. “[He is] the world’s writer, a master of language and perception.”

INTRODUCTION BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK

Salim, the narrator of A Bend in the River, is a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast of Central Africa, perhaps in what is now known as Zaire. The young man’s placement in the world is part of the dramatic structure and vision of the novel. “Africa was my home, had been the home of my family for centuries. But we came from the east coast and that made a difference. The coast was not truly Africa. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean.” In the novel, Salim has left the coast to make his way in the interior, there to take on a small trading shop of this and that, sundries, sold to the natives. The place is “a bend in the river”; it is Africa. There are other Indian families in the town, but the displacement of Salim is to some degree a part of the displacement of the country.

The time is post-colonial, the time of Independence. The Europeans have withdrawn or been forced to withdraw, and the scene is one of chaos, violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation, poverty, and a lack of preparation for the modern world they have entered, or partially assumed as a sort of decoration. The blind assurance of the colonial administration, with its rules, its commercial exploitation of the available resources, its avenues and handsome houses and clubs for the pleasure of the foreign settlers, has given way to the blinding conflagrations in so many of the newly independent states. Here the power is currently in the hands of the President, a tribal warrior threatened by the ambitions of other warriors of other tribes.

A Bend in the River is a story of historical upheaval and social breakdown. The collision of cultures in India, Islam, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean inform the extraordinary scope of Naipaul’s creative imagination in fiction and in his books of travel about the world, journeys so angular and personal they cannot be classified as travel books. He was born in Trinidad in 1932, born into a Hindu family that had come generations back as indentured servants from the subcontinent of India to a tropical island in the Caribbean, where Hindus were a minority. Perhaps the shape of his vision owes something to his own placement in the world — something, but not everything, since he is a writer of great intellectual curiosity, deep culture, and the most serious kind of literary ambition. From Trinidad he made his way to Oxford and has lived in England since then, all the while producing some twenty-two volumes. His work gives the sense that to him the art of writing is a vocation, a sort of sanctified calling rather than a career. The biographical facts come to mind because there is a Savonarola tonality sometimes in Naipaul’s eloquence about the damage of sentimentality and false hopes. In A Bend in the River, the creeping, suffocating corruption and destructiveness that accompany the tribal coming into power or plotting for power, the instability of arrangements, the unappeased crowds of long-suffering natives descending upon the town: all of this is the landscape in which the novel proceeds. There are Indian traders and proprietors of one business or another, a white European couple, an old Belgian priest of long residence, Africans seeking opportunity. The novel is an undertaking of some risk and out of the risk Naipaul has fashioned a work of intense imaginative force.

The President: “The President I had seen only in photographs — first in army uniform, then in the stylish short-sleeved jacket and cravat, and then in his leopard-skin chief’s cap and his carved stick, emblem of his chieftaincy. . . .” The myth-making of the President will consume the new nation as he consolidates his power, his wealth, his grandiose expenditures in a mini-city to be called the Domain, and in the elevation of his biography with statues to his mother, who had been a maid in a colonial hotel. “As an African, he was building a new town on the site of what had been a rich European suburb — but what he was building was meant to be grander. . . . He was creating modern Africa. He was creating a miracle that would astound the rest of the world.”

One of the characters in the book is Father Huismans, a Belgian priest, who has with a tireless obsession made a museum collection of native masks and carvings, information on native religions, and also scattered relics of the colonial presence. Father Huismans goes about digging and searching with a sort of nai’ve industry. He appears quite indifferent to the drastic alterations brought about by the new government; he looks upon it as the flow of time in a mood of This too will pass. Nevertheless, he is brutally killed on one of his expeditions. The collection — “the richest product of the forest” — is left to deteriorate and to suffer the pillaging of an American admirer of primitive art. The Africans considered, or were told to consider, the collection of masks and carvings an affront to their religion.

Salim is an interesting first-person narrator, and he oars his way through the shark-infested waters of that structural choice without showing undue exertion to keep afloat. He is sensitive, observant, of a somewhat melancholy inclination, a pessimism he does not attribute to to a Hindu “conviction about the vanity of all human endeavour.” Instead his pessimism is not a result of religion, but of his “seeking to occupy the middle ground, between absorption in life and soaring above the cares of the earth.” Nevertheless, he gets around, dines out, has an affair, plays squash at the Hellenic Club. “Canvas shoes, shorts, racket, towel around my neck — it was like old times on the coast.”

At the opening of the story, Zabeth, a native woman from one of the fishing villages, comes to Salim’s shop to buy articles she will take back to sell to the natives, thereby making her living as a marchande. Salim admires the energy that gets her back and forth on the river and agrees, with a sigh, when she asks him to take on her son, Ferdinand, to place him in the lycée in the town and by education to rescue him from the “bush.” (“Bush” — a term throughout that signifies not only vegetation but also the backwardness and primitive conditions and the primitive psychology perhaps of those cut off from the accommodations necessary for life in the towns and cities.)

Ferdinand will finish the lycée, go on to the polytech, and advance to an administrative position in the capital, where the President reigns. So Ferdinand is the new Africa, or the new African. He has escaped, but his progress is unsteady because the President and his troops are brutal and capricious; he who has risen can be cut down. When, later, Salim sees Ferdinand in the capital, he does not find a young man puffed up with pride and position but someone “shrunken, and characterless. . . . These men, who depended on the President’s favour for everything, were bundles of nerves. The great power they exercised went with a constant fear of being destroyed. And they were unstable, half dead.”

Yvette, Belgian, and Raymond, English, are a couple who have parties, play Joan Baez on the gramophone, dance until the early morning, and so on. It is with Yvette that Salim will have an affair, a sort of alliance of bored colonials far from home, diverting, but not overwhelming. Raymond is an academic, an Africanist, writing his book while living on the scene as a specialist. He is a rather humble person, a sincere, liberal-minded collector of material from printed sources duly noted in footnotes. There is a comical aspect to his industry and to the position he reaches in the new Africa. Some time back, while teaching in a college in the capital, he had been visited by a striving African mother, the hotel maid who will later be canonized by the revolution. The mother visits Raymond for advice about the future of her son, very much in the way Salim had been called to “rescue” Ferdinand. Raymond meets with the son and tells him to forget law and the professions and instead to join the Defence Force. The son will become the President and Raymond will be his adviser, his White Man, as it were. Raymond is the voice of sincere hope for the country, for freedom, home rule, accommodation of the treacherous obstacles an exploited, ignorant nation will face. About the President he says: “He’s a truly remarkable man. I don’t think we give him credit for what he has done. He’s disciplined the army and brought peace to this land of many peoples.”

In the end, everything is overwhelmed, crushed by civic chaos. The President’s power is challenged and the reprisals are bloody. He has no use now for his White Man, and when Salim goes by their house, Raymond and Yvette have gone. It is occupied by an African. His own store is confiscated, and he is arrested for — pessimist that he has been — storing gold and ivory against disaster. Ferdinand, harassed himself, is still in a position to get Salim released and to insist that he leave the country. So the Indian storekeeper from the coast has lived his time in a bend in the river and now must retrace the steps of his passage. Salim manages to get away on a steamer, the vessel of the advanced world, while desperate people hanging on to a river barge with the hope of escape are swamped.

“The searchlight lit up the barge passengers, who, behind bars and wire guards, as yet scarcely seemed to understand that they were adrift. Then there were gunshots. . . . The steamer started up again and moved without lights down the river, away from the scene of battle. The air would have been full of moths and flying insects. The searchlight, while it was on, had shown thousands, white in the white light.“

The novel ends in darkness. It is a haunting creation, rich with incident and human bafflement, played out in an immense detail of landscape rendered with a poignant brillance.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

by Elizabeth Hardwick ix

ONE The Second Rebellion 1

TWO The New Domain 125

THREE The Big Man 273

FOUR Battle 369

ONE

THE SECOND REBELLION

CHAPTER 1

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

Nazruddin, who had sold me the shop cheap, didn’t think I would have it easy when I took over. The country, like others in Africa, had had its troubles after independence. The town in the interior, at the bend in the great river, had almost ceased to exist; and Nazruddin said I would have to start from the beginning.

I drove up from the coast in my Peugeot. That isn’t the kind of drive you can do nowadays in Africa — from the east coast right through to the centre. Too many of the places on the way have closed down or are full of blood. And even at that time, when the roads were more or less open, the drive took me over a week.

It wasn’t only the sand drifts and the mud and the narrow, winding, broken roads up in the mountains. There was all that business at the frontier posts, all that haggling in the forest outside wooden huts that flew strange flags. I had to talk myself and my Peugeot past the men with guns — just to drive through bush and more bush. And then I had to talk even harder, and shed a few more bank notes and give away more of my tinned food, to get myself — and the Peugeot — out of the places I had talked us into.

Some of these palavers could take half a day. The top man would ask for something quite ridiculous — two or three thousand dollars. I would say no. He would go into his hut, as though there was nothing more to say; I would hang around outside, because there was nothing else for me to do. Then after an hour or two I would go inside the hut, or he would come outside, and we would settle for two or three dollars. It was as Nazruddin had said, when I asked him about visas and he had said that bank notes were better. “You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out. That is a private fight. Everybody has to find his own way.”

As I got deeper into Africa — the scrub, the desert, the rocky climb up to the mountains, the lakes, the rain in the afternoons, the mud, and then, on the other, wetter side of the mountains, the fern forests and the gorilla forests — as I got deeper I thought: But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can’t be a new life at the end of this.

But I drove on. Each day’s drive was like an achievement; each day’s achievement made it harder for me to turn back. And I couldn’t help thinking that that was how it was in the old days with the slaves. They had made the same journey, but of course on foot and in the opposite direction, from the centre of the continent to the east coast. The further away they got from the centre and their tribal area, the less likely they were to cut loose from the caravans and run back home, the more nervous they became of the strange Africans they saw about them, until at the end, on the coast, they were no trouble at all, and were positively anxious to step into the boats and be taken to safe homes across the sea. Like the slave far from home, I became anxious only to arrive. The greater the discouragements of the journey, the keener I was to press on and embrace my new life.

When I arrived I found that Nazruddin hadn’t lied. The place had had its troubles: the town at the bend in the river was more than half destroyed. What had been the European suburb near the rapids had been burnt down, and bush had grown over the ruins; it was hard to distinguish what had been gardens from what had been streets. The official and commercial area near the dock and customs house survived, and some residential streets in the centre. But there wasn’t much else. Even the African cités were inhabited only in corners, and in decay elsewhere, with many of the low, box-like concrete houses in pale blue or pale green abandoned, hung with quick-growing, quick-dying tropical vines, mattings of brown and green.

Nazruddin’s shop was in a market square in the commercial area. It smelt of rats and was fall of dung, but it was intact. I had bought Nazruddin’s stock — but there was none of that. I had also bought the goodwill — but that was meaningless, because so many of the Africans had gone back to the bush, to the safety of their villages, which lay up hidden and difficult creeks.

After my anxiety to arrive, there was little for me to do. But I was not alone. There were other traders, other foreigners; some of them had been there right through the troubles. I waited with them. The peace held. People began coming back to the town; the cite yards filled up. People began needing the goods which we could supply. And slowly business started up again.

Zabeth was among the earliest of my regular customers. She was a marchande — not a market woman, but a retailer in a small way. She belonged to a fishing community, almost a little tribe, and every month or so she came from her village to the town to buy her goods wholesale.

From me she bought pencils and copybooks, razor blades, syringes, soap and toothpaste and toothbrushes, cloth, plastic toys, iron pots and aluminum pans, enamel plates and basins. These were some of the simple things Zabeth’s fisherfolk needed from the outside world, and had been doing without during the troubles. Not essentials, not luxuries; but things that made ordinary life easier. The people here had many skills; they could get by on their own. They tanned leather, wove cloth, worked iron; they hollowed out large tree trunks into boats and smaller ones into kitchen mortars. But to people looking for a large vessel that wouldn’t taint water and food, and wouldn’t leak, imagine what a blessing an enamel basin was!

Zabeth knew exactly what the people of her village needed and how much they would be able or willing to pay for it. Traders on the coast (including my own father) used to say — especially when they were consoling themselves for some bad purchase — that everything eventually had its buyer. That wasn’t so here. People were interested in new things — like the syringes, which were a surprise to me — and even modern things; but their tastes had set around the first examples of these things that they had accepted. They trusted a particular design, a particular trademark. It was useless for me to try to “sell” anything to Zabeth; I had to stick as far as possible to familiar stock. It made for dull business, but it avoided complications. And it helped to make Zabeth the good and direct businesswoman that, unusually for an African, she was.

She didn’t know how to read and write. She carried her complicated shopping list in her head and she remembered what she had paid for things on previous occasions. She never asked for credit — she hated the idea. She paid in cash, taking the money out from the vanity case she brought to town with her. Every trader knew about Zabeth’s vanity case. It wasn’t that she distrusted banks; she didn’t understand them.

I would say to her, in that mixed river language we used, “One day, Beth, somebody will snatch your case. It isn’t safe to travel about with money like that.”

“The day that happens, Mis’ Salim, I will know the time has come to stay home.”

It was a strange way of thinking. But she was a strange woman.

“Mis’,” as used by Zabeth and others, was short for “mister.” I was mister because I was a foreigner, someone from the far-off coast, and an English-speaker; and I was mister in order to be distinguished from the other resident foreigners, who were monsieur. That was, of course, before the Big Man came along and made us all citoyens and citoyennes. Which was all right for a while, until the lies he started making us all live made the people confused and frightened, and when a fetish stronger than his was found, made them decide to put an end to it all and go back again to the beginning.

Zabeth’s village was only about sixty miles away. But it was some distance off the road, which was little more than a track; and it was some miles in from the main river. By land or by water it was a difficult journey, and took two days. By land during the rainy season it could take three. In the beginning Zabeth came by the land way, trekking with her women assistants to the road and waiting there for a van or truck or bus. When the steamers started up again, Zabeth always used the river; and that wasn’t much easier.

The secret channels from the villages were shallow, full of snags, humming with mosquitoes. Down these channels Zabeth and her women poled and often pushed their dugouts to the main river. There, close to the bank, they waited for the steamer, the dugouts full of goods — usually food — to be sold to people on the steamer and the barge the steamer towed. The food was mainly fish or monkey, fresh or boucané — smoked in the way of the country, with a thick black crust. Sometimes there was a smoked snake or a smoked small crocodile, a black hunk barely recognizable for what it had been — but with white or pale pink flesh below the charred crust.

When the steamer appeared, with its passenger barge in tow, Zabeth and her women poled or paddled out to the middle of the river and stood at the edge of the steamer channel, drifting down with the current. The steamer passed; the dugouts rocked in the swell; and then came the critical moment when the dugouts and the barge came close together. Zabeth and her women threw ropes onto the lower steel deck of the barge, where there were always hands to grab the ropes and tie them to some bulkhead; and the dugouts, from drifting downstream and against the side of the barge, began moving in the other direction, while people on the barge threw down pieces of paper or cloth on the fish or the monkey they wanted to buy.

This attaching of dugouts to the moving steamer or barge was a recognized river practice, but it was dangerous. Almost every trip the steamer made there was a report of a dugout being overturned somewhere along the thousand-mile route and of people being drowned. But the risk was worth taking: afterwards, without labour, as a marchande selling goods, Zabeth was towed up the river to the very edge of the town, uncoupling her dugouts by the ruins of the cathedral, a little before the docks, to avoid the officials there, who were always anxious to claim some tax. What a journey! Such trouble and danger to sell simple village things, and to take other goods back to the people of her village.

For a day or two before the steamer came there was a market and a camp in the open space outside the dock gate. Zabeth became part of this camp while she was in the town. If it rained she slept in the verandah of a grocery or a bar; at a later date she put up in an African lodging house, but in the beginning such places didn’t exist. When she came to the shop there was nothing in her appearance that spoke of her difficult journey or her nights in the open. She was formally dressed, wrapped in her cotton in the African style that by folds and drapes emphasized the bigness of her bottom. She wore a turban — a piece of downriver style; and she had her vanity case with the creased notes she had got from people in her village and people on the steamer and barge. She shopped, she paid; and some hours before the steamer sailed again her women — thin, short, bald-looking, and in ragged working clothes — came to take the goods away.

This was a quicker journey, downriver. But it was just as dangerous, with the same coupling and uncoupling of the dugouts and the barge. In those days the steamer left the town at four in the afternoon; so it was deep night when Zabeth and her women came to where they had to cast off from the steamer. Zabeth took care then not to give away the entrance to her village. She cast off; she waited for the steamer and the barge and the lights to disappear. Then she and her women poled back up or drifted down to their secret channel, and their nighttime labour of poling and pushing below the overhanging trees.

Going home at night! It wasn’t often that I was on the river at night. I never liked it. I never felt in control. In the darkness of river and forest you could be sure only of what you could see — and even on a moonlight night you couldn’t see much When you made a noise — dipped a paddle in the water — you heard yourself as though you were another person. The river and the forest were like presences, and much more powerful than you. You felt unprotected, an intruder.

In the daylight — though the colours could be very pale and ghostly, with the heat mist at times suggesting a colder climate — you could imagine the town being rebuilt and spreading. You could imagine the forests being uprooted, the roads being laid across creeks and swamps. You could imagine the land being made part of the present: that was how the Big Man put it later, offering us the vision of a two-hundred-mile “industrial park” along the river. (But he didn’t mean it really; it was only his wish to appear a greater magician than any the place had ever known.) In daylight, though, you could believe in that vision of the future. You could imagine the land being made ordinary, fit for men like yourself, as small parts of it had been made ordinary for a short while before independence — the very parts that were now in ruins.

But at night, if you were on the river, it was another thing. You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there. You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.

What journeys Zabeth made! It was as though she came out each time from her hidden place to snatch from the present (or the future) some precious cargo to take back to her people — those razor blades, for instance, to be taken out from their packets and sold one by one, miracles of metal — cargo that became more precious the further she got from the town, the nearer she got to her fishing village, the true, safe world, protected from other men by forest and clogged-up waterways. And protected in other ways as well. Every man here knew that he was watched from above by his ancestors, living forever in a higher sphere, their passage on earth not forgotten, but essentially preserved, part of the presence of the forest. In the deepest forest was the greatest security. That was the security that Zabeth left behind, to get her precious cargo; that was the security to which she returned.

No one liked going outside his territory. But Zabeth travelled without fear; she came and went with her vanity case and no one molested her. She was not an ordinary person. In appearance she was not at all like the people of our region. They were small and slight and very black. Zabeth was a big woman with a coppery complexion; there were times when this copper glow, especially on her cheekbones, looked like a kind of makeup. There was something else about Zabeth. She had a special smell. It was strong and unpleasant, and at first I thought — because she came from a fishing village — that it was an old and deep smell of fish. Then I thought it had to do with her restricted village diet. But the people of Zabeth’s tribe whom I met didn’t smell like Zabeth. Africans noticed her smell. If they came into the shop when Zabeth was there they wrinkled their noses and sometimes they went away.

Metty, the half-African boy who had grown up in my family’s house on the coast and had come to join me, Metty said that Zabeth’s smell was strong enough to keep mosquitoes away. I thought myself that it was this smell that kept men away from Zabeth, in spite of her fleshiness (which the men here liked) and in spite of her vanity case — because Zabeth wasn’t married and, so far as I knew, lived with no man.

But the smell was meant to keep people at a distance. It was Metty — learning local customs fast — who told me that Zabeth was a magician, and was known in our region as a magician. Her smell was the smell of her protecting ointments. Other women used perfumes and scents to attract; Zabeth’s ointments repelled and warned. She was protected. She knew it, and other people knew it.

I had treated Zabeth so far as a marchande and a good customer. Now that I knew that in our region she was a person of power, a prophetess, I could never forget it. So the charm worked on me as well.

CHAPTER 2

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 upcountry people; we looked east to the lands with 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 northwestern India, from which we had 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 my 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. He couldn’t tell me when he had done this. It was just there in his memory, floating around, without date or other association, as an unusual event in an uneventful life. He didn’t tell it as a piece of wickedness or trickery or as a joke; he just told it as something unusual that he had done — not shipping the slaves, but describing them as rubber. And without my own memory of the old man’s story I suppose that would have been a piece of history lost forever. I believe, from my later reading, that the idea of rubber would have occurred to my grandfather at the time, before the First World War, when rubber became big business — and later a big scandal — in central Africa. So that facts are known to me which remained hidden or uninteresting to my grandfather.

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.

There was a stockade on this beach. The walls were of brick. It was a ruin when I was a boy, and in tropical Africa, land of impermanent building, it was like a rare piece of history. It was in this stockade that the slaves were kept after they had been marched down from the interior in the caravans; there they waited for the dhows to take them across the sea. But if you didn’t know, then the place was nothing, just four crumbling walls in a picture-postcard setting of beach and coconut trees.

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.

The slavery of the east coast was not like the slavery of the west coast. No one was shipped off to plantations. Most of the people who left our coast went to Arabian homes as domestic servants. Some became members of the family they had joined; a few became powerful in their own right. To an African, a child of the forest, who had marched down hundreds of miles from the interior and was far from his village and tribe, the protection of a foreign family was preferable to being alone among strange and unfriendly Africans. This was one reason why the trade went on long after it had been outlawed by the European powers; and why, at the time when the Europeans were dealing in one kind of rubber, my grandfather could still occasionally deal in another. This was also the reason why a secret slavery continued on the coast until the other day. The slaves, or the people who might be considered slaves, wanted to remain as they were.

In my family’s compound 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.

When I was young I would be taken for walks in the narrow white-walled lanes of the old part of the town, which was where our house was. I would be bathed and dressed; they would put kohl on my eyes and hang a good-luck charm around my neck; and then Mustafa, one of our old men, would hoist me on his shoulders. That was how I took my walk: Mustafa displaying me on his shoulders, displaying the worth of our family, and at the same time displaying his own trusted position in our family. There were some boys who made a point of taunting us. Mustafa, when we ran into these boys, would set me down, encourage me to speak insults, would add to these insults himself, would encourage me to fight, and then, when things became too hot for me, would lift me out of reach of the boys’ feet and fists and place me again on his shoulders. And we would continue our walk.

This talk of Mustafa and Arabia and dhows and slaves might sound like something out of the Arabian Nights. But when I think of Mustafa, and even when I hear the word “slave,” I think of the squalor of our family compound, a mixture of school yard and back yard: all those people, someone always shrieking, quantities of clothes hanging on the lines or spread out on the bleaching stones, the sour smell of those stones running into the smell of the latrine and the barred-off urinal corner, piles of dirty enamel and brass dishes on the washing-up stand in the middle of the yard, children running about everywhere, endless cooking in the blackened kitchen building. I think of a hubbub of women and children, of my sisters and their families, the servant women and their families, both sides apparently in constant competition; I think of quarrels in the family rooms, competitive quarrels in the servants’ quarters. There were too many of us in the small compound. We didn’t want all those people in the servants’ quarters. But they weren’t ordinary servants, and there was no question of getting rid of them. We were stuck with them.

That was how it was on the east coast. The slaves could take over, and in more than one way. The people in our servant houses were no longer pure African. It wasn’t acknowledged by the family, but somewhere along the line, or at many places along the line, the blood of Asia had been added to those people. Mustafa had the blood of Gujarat in his veins; so had Metty, the boy who later came all the way across the continent to join me. This, though, was a transferring of blood from master to slave. With the Arabs on our coast the process had worked the other way. The slaves had swamped the masters; the Arabian race of the master had virtually disappeared.

Once, great explorers and warriors, the Arabs had ruled. They had pushed far into the interior and had built towns and planted orchards in the forest. Then their power had been broken by Europe. Their towns and orchards disappeared, swallowed up in bush. They ceased to be driven on by their idea of their position in the world, and their energy was lost; they forgot who they were and where they had come from. They knew only that they were Muslims; and in the Muslim way they needed wives and more wives. But they were cut off from their roots in Arabia and could only find their wives among the African women who had once been their slaves. Soon, therefore, the Arabs, or the people who called themselves Arabs, had become indistinguishable from Africans. They barely had an idea of their original civilization. They had the Koran and its laws; they stuck to certain fashions in dress, wore a certain kind of cap, had a special cut of beard; and that was all. They had little idea of what their ancestors had done in Africa. They had only the habit of authority, without the energy or the education to back up that authority. The authority of the Arabs — which was real enough when I was a boy — was only a matter of custom. It could be blown away at any time. The world is what it is.

I was worried for the Arabs. I was also worried for us. Because, so far as power went, there was no difference between the Arabs and ourselves. We were both small groups living under a European flag at the edge of the continent. In our family house when I was a child I never heard a discussion about our future or the future of the coast. The assumption seemed to be that things would continue, that marriages would continue to be arranged between approved parties, that trade and business would go on, that Africa would be for us as it had been.

My sisters married in the traditional way; it was assumed that I, too, would marry when the time came and extend the life of our family house. But it came to me while I was quite young, still at school, that our way of life was antiquated and almost at an end.

Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area. The British administration gave us beautiful stamps. These stamps depicted local scenes and local things; there was one called “Arab Dhow.” It was as though, in those stamps, a foreigner had said, “This is what is most striking about this place.” Without that stamp of the dhow I might have taken the dhows for granted. As it was, I learned to look at them. Whenever I saw them tied up at the waterfront I thought of them as something peculiar to our region, quaint, something the foreigner would remark on, something not quite modern, and certainly nothing like the liners and cargo ships that berthed in our own modern docks.

So from an early age I developed the habit of looking, detaching myself from a familiar scene and trying to consider it as from a distance. It was from this habit of looking that the idea came to me that as a community we had fallen behind. And that was the beginning of my insecurity.

I used to think of this feeling of insecurity as a weakness, a failing of my own temperament, and I would have been ashamed if anyone had found out about it. I kept my ideas about the future to myself, and that was easy enough in our house, where, as I have said, there was never anything like a political discussion. My family were not fools. My father and his brothers were traders, businessmen; in their own way they had to keep up with the times. They could assess situations; they took risks and sometimes they could be very bold. But they were buried so deep in their lives that they were not able to stand back and consider the nature of their lives. They did what they had to do. When things went wrong they had the consolations of religion. This wasn’t just a readiness to accept Fate; this was a quiet and profound conviction about the vanity of all human endeavour.

I could never rise so high. My own pessimism, my insecurity, was a more terrestrial affair. I was without the religious sense of my family. The insecurity I felt was due to my lack of true religion, and was like the small change of the exalted pessimism of our faith, the pessimism that can drive men on to do wonders. It was the price for my more materialist attitude, my seeking to occupy the middle ground, between absorption in life and soaring above the cares of the earth.

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 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 more 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.

Because they could assess themselves, the Europeans were better equipped to cope with changes than we were. And I saw, when I compared the Europeans with ourselves, that we had ceased to count in Africa, that really we no longer had anything to offer. The Europeans were preparing to get out, or to fight, or to meet the Africans halfway. We continued to live as we had always done, blindly. Even at this late stage there was never anything like a political discussion in our house or in the houses of families I knew. The subject was avoided. I found myself avoiding it.

I used to go twice a week to play squash in the squash court of my friend Indar. His grandfather had come from the Punjab in India to work on the railway as a contract labourer. The old Punjabi had done well. When he had worked out his contract he had settled on the coast and become a market money-lender, lending twenty or thirty shillings a time to stall-keepers in the market who ran short and depended on these small loans to buy their goods. For ten shillings lent this week twelve or fifteen had to be returned the next. Not the best kind of business; but an active man (and a tough man) could increase his capital many times over in a year. Well, it was a service, and a living. And more than a living. The family had become very grand. They had become merchant bankers in an unofficial way, staking small prospecting companies, staking trading ventures to India and Arabia and the Persian Gulf (still in the Arab dhows of the postage stamp).

The family lived in a big compound in an asphalted yard. The main house was at the far end; there were smaller houses at the side for members of the family who wished to live by themselves, other houses for the servants (proper servants, hire-and-fire people, not limpets like ours); and there was the squash court. Everything was surrounded by a high ochre-washed wall, and there was a main gate with a watchman. The compound was in a newer part of the town; I didn’t think it was possible to be more exclusive or protected.

Rich people never forget they are rich, and I looked upon Indar as a good son of his money-lending or banking family. He was handsome, careful of his appearance, and slightly effeminate, with something buttoned up in his expression. I put that expression down to his regard for his own wealth and also to his sexual anxieties. I thought he was a great brothel man on the sly and lived in fear of being exposed or catching some disease.

We were having cold orange juice and hot black tea after our game (Indar was already concerned about his weight), when he told me he was leaving. He was going away, going to England to a famous university to do a three-year course. It was like Indar, and his family, to announce important news in this casual way. The news depressed me a little. Indar could do what he was doing not only because he was rich (I associated going abroad to study with great wealth), but also because he had gone right through our local English-language college until he was eighteen. I had left when I was sixteen. Not because I wasn’t bright or didn’t have the inclination, but because no one in our family had stayed at school after sixteen.

We were sitting on the steps of the squash court, in the shade. Indar said in his quiet way, “We’re washed up here, you know. To be in Africa you have to be strong. We’re not strong. We don’t even have a flag.”

He had mentioned the unmentionable. And as soon as he spoke I saw the wall of his compound as useless. Two generations had built what I saw; and I mourned for that lost labour. As soon as Indar spoke I felt I could enter his mind and see what he saw — the mocking quality of the grandeur, the gate and the watchman that wouldn’t be able to keep out the true danger.

But I gave no sign that I understood what he was talking about. I behaved like the others who had infuriated and saddened me by refusing to acknowledge that change was coming to our part of the world. And when Indar went on to ask, “What are you going to do?” I said, as though I didn’t see any problem, “I’ll stay. I’ll go into the business.”

It wasn’t true at all. It was the opposite of what I felt. But I found that I was unwilling — as soon as the question had been put to me — to acknowledge my helplessness. I instinctively fell into the attitudes of my family. But with me the fatalism was bogus; I cared very much about the world and wished to renounce nothing. All I could do was to hide from the truth. And that discovery about myself made the walk back through the hot town very disturbing.

The afternoon sun fell on the soft black asphalt road and the tall hibiscus hedges. It was all so ordinary. There was as yet no danger in the crowds, the broken-down streets, the blank-walled lanes. But the place was poisoned for me.

I had an upstairs room in our family house. It was still light when I got back. I looked out over our compound, saw the trees and greenery of the neighbouring yards and open spaces. My aunt was calling to one of her daughters: some old brass vases that had been taken out to the yard to be scoured with limes hadn’t been taken back in. I looked at that devout woman, sheltered behind her wall, and saw how petty her concern with the brass vases was. The thin whitewashed wall (thinner than the wall of the slave stockade on the beach) protected her so little. She was so vulnerable — her person, her religion, her customs, her way of life. The squalling yard had contained its own life, had been its own complete world, for so long. How could anyone not take it for granted? How could anyone stop to ask what it was that had really protected us?

I remembered the look of contempt and irritation Indar had given me. And the decision I came to then was this. I had to break away. I couldn’t protect anyone; no one could protect me. We couldn’t protect ourselves; we could only in various ways hide from the truth. I had to break away from our family compound and our community. To stay with my community, to pretend that I had simply to travel along with them, was to be taken with them to destruction. I could be master of my fate only if I stood alone. One tide of history — forgotten by us, living only in books by Europeans that I was yet to read — had brought us here. We had lived our lives in our way, done what we had to do, worshipped God and obeyed his commandments. Now — to echo Indar’s words — another tide of history was coming to wash us away.

I could no longer submit to Fate. My wish was not to be good, in the way of our tradition, but to make good. But how? What did I have to offer? What talent, what skill, apart from the African trading skills of our family? This anxiety began to eat away at me. And that was why, when Nazruddin made his offer, of a shop and business in a far-off country that was still in Africa, I clutched at it.

Nazruddin was an exotic in our community. He was a man of my father’s age, but he looked much younger and was altogether more a man of the world. He played tennis, drank wine, spoke French, wore dark glasses and suits (with very wide lapels, the tips of which curled down). He was known among us (and slightly mocked behind his back) for his European manners, which he had picked up not from Europe (he had never been there), but from a town in the centre of Africa where he lived and had his business.

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 following 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.

Nazruddin was an exotic, but he remained bound to our community because he needed husbands and wives for his children. I always knew that in me he saw the prospective husband of one of his daughters; but I had lived with this knowledge for so long that it didn’t embarrass me. I liked Nazruddin. I welcomed his visits, his talk, his very alienness as he sat downstairs in our drawing room or verandah and spoke of the excitements of his far-off world.

He was a man of enthusiasms. He relished everything he did. He liked the houses he bought (always bargains), the restaurants he chose, the dishes he had ordered. Everything worked out well for him, and his tales of unfailing luck would have made him intolerable if he didn’t have the gift of describing things so well. He made me long to do what he had done, to be where he had been. In some ways he became my model.

He was something of a palmist, in addition to everything else, and his readings were valued because he could do them only when the mood took him. When I was ten or twelve he had given me a reading and had seen great things in my hand. So I respected his judgment. He added to that reading from time to time. I remember one occasion especially. He was on the bent-wood rocker, rocking unsteadily from the edge of the carpet onto the concrete floor. He broke off what he was saying and asked to see my hand. He felt the tips of my fingers, bent my fingers, looked briefly at my palm, and then let my hand go. He thought for a little about what he had seen — it was his way, thinking about what he had seen rather than looking at the hand all the time — and he said, “You are the most faithful man I know.” This didn’t please me; it seemed to me he was offering me no life at all. I said, “Can you read your own hand? Do you know what’s in store for you?” He said, “Don’t I know, don’t I know.” The tone of his voice was different then, and I saw that this man, for whom (according to his talk) everything worked out beautifully, really lived with a vision of things turning out badly. I thought: This is how a man should behave; and I felt close to him after that, closer than I did to members of my own family.

Then came the crash which some people had been quietly prophesying for this successful and talkative man. Nazruddin’s adopted country became independent, quite suddenly, and the news from that place for weeks and months was of wars and killings. From the way some people talked you might have believed that if Nazruddin had been another kind of person, if he had boasted less of his success, drunk less wine and been more seemly in his behaviour, events would have taken another turn. We heard that he had fled with his family to Uganda. There was a report that they had driven through the bush for days on the back of a truck and had turned up panic-stricken and destitute at the border town of Kisoro.

At least he was safe. In due course he came to the coast. People looking for a broken man were disappointed. Nazruddin was as sprightly as ever, still with his dark glasses and suit. The disaster appeared not to have touched him at all.

Usually when Nazruddin came to visit, efforts were made to receive him well. The drawing room was given a special cleaning, and the brass vases with the hunting scenes were polished up. But this time, because of the belief that he was a man in trouble, and therefore ordinary again, just like us, no one had tried hard. The drawing room was in its usual state of mess and we sat out on the verandah facing the yard.

My mother brought tea, offering it not in the usual way, as the shamefaced hospitality of simple folk, but behaving as though she was performing some necessary final rite. When she put the tray down she seemed about to burst into tears. My brothers-in-law gathered around with concerned faces. But from Nazruddin — in spite of that tale about the long-distance ride on the back of a truck — there came no stories of disaster, only stories of continuing luck and success. He had seen the trouble coming; he had pulled out months before it came.

Nazruddin said: “It wasn’t the Africans who made me nervous. It was the Europeans and the others. Just before a crash people go crazy. We had a fantastic property boom. Everybody was only talking about money. A piece of bush costing nothing today was selling for half a million francs tomorrow. It was like magic, but with real money. I got caught up in it myself, and nearly got trapped.

“One Sunday morning I went out to the development where I had bought a few lots. The weather was bad. Hot and heavy. The sky was dark but it wasn’t going to rain; it was just going to stay like that. The lightning was far away — it was raining somewhere else in the forest. I thought: What a place to live in! I could hear the river — the development wasn’t too far from the rapids. I listened to the river and looked up at that sky and I thought: This isn’t property. This is just bush. This has always been bush. I could scarcely wait for Monday morning after that. I put everything up for sale. Lower than the going price, but I asked to be paid in Europe. I sent the family to Uganda.

“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.”

That was Nazruddin. We had imagined him done for. Instead, he was trying to excite us with his enthusiasm for his new country, and asking us to contemplate his luck yet again. The patronage, in fact, was all on his side. Though he never said anything openly, he saw us on the coast as threatened, and he had come that day to make me an offer.

He still had interests in his old country — a shop, a few agencies. He had thought it prudent to keep the shop on, while he was transferring his assets out of the country, to prevent people looking at his affairs too closely. And it was this shop and those agencies that he now offered me.

“They aren’t worth anything now. But they will be again. I really should be giving it to you for nothing. But that would be bad for you and for me. You must always know when to pull out. A businessman isn’t a mathematician. Remember that. Never become hypnotized by the beauty of numbers. A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. Well, it gets back there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he’s got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement.”

I said, “This shop: assuming you bought at ten, what would you say you were selling it to me for?”

“Two. In three or four years it will climb up to six. Business never dies in Africa; it is only interrupted. For me it is a waste of time to see that two get up to six. There is more for me in cotton in Uganda. But for you it will be a trebling of your capital. What you must always know is when to get out.“

Nazruddin had seen faithfulness in my hand. But he had read me wrong. Because when I accepted his offer I was in an important way breaking faith with him. I had accepted his offer because I wanted to break away. To break away from my family and community also meant breaking away from my unspoken commitment to Nazruddin and his daughter.

She was a lovely girl. Once a year, for a few weeks, she came to the coast to stay with her father’s sister. She was better educated than I was; there was some talk of her going in for accountancy or law. She would have been a very nice girl to marry, but I admired her as I would have admired a girl of my own family. Nothing would have been easier than to marry Nazruddin’s daughter. Nothing, to me, would have been more stifling. And it was from that stifling as well as from everything else that I drove away, when I left the coast in the Peugeot.

I was breaking faith with Nazruddin. Yet he — a relisher of life, a seeker after experience — had been my exemplar; and it was to his town that I drove. All that I knew of the town at the bend of the river I had got from Nazruddin’s stories. Ridiculous things can work on us at moments of strain; and towards the end of that hard drive what was often in my head was what Nazruddin had said about the restaurants of the town, about the food of Europe and the wine. “The wines are Saccone and Speed,” he had said. It was a merchant’s observation. He had meant that even there, i

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 824