A Bend in the River

Our ideas of men were simple; Africa was a place where we had to survive. But in the Domain it was different. There they could scoff at trade and gold, because in the magical atmosphere of the Domain, among the avenues and new houses, another Africa had been created. In the Domain Africans—the young men at the polytechnic—were romantic. They were not always present at the parties or gatherings; but the whole life of the Domain was built around them. In the town “African” could be a word of abuse or disregard; in the Domain it was a bigger word. An “African” there was a new man whom everybody was busy making, a man about to inherit—the important man that years before, at the lycée, Ferdinand had seen himself as.

I thought how far we had both come, to talk about Africa like this. We had even learned to take African magic seriously. It hadn’t been like that on the coast. But as we talked that evening about the seminar, I began to wonder whether Indar and I weren’t fooling ourselves and whether we weren’t allowing the Africa we talked about to become too different from the Africa we knew. Ferdinand didn’t want to lose touch with the spirits; he was nervous of being his own. That had been at the back of his question. We all understood his anxiety; but it was as though, at the seminar, everyone had been ashamed, or fearful, of referring to it directly. The discussion had been full of words of another kind, about religion and history. It was like that on the Domain; Africa there was a special place.

“Such a work, if adequately prepared, might well become the handbook for a true revolution throughout the continent. Always you can catch that quality of the young man’s despair […] Always you have that feeling that the damage can never perhaps be undone. Always there is that note, for those with the ears to hear it, of the young man grieving for the humiliations of his mother, the hotel maid […] I don’t think people know that earlier this year he and his entire government made a pilgrimage to the village of that woman of Africa […] Can you imagine the humiliations of an African hotel maid in colonial times? No amount of piety can make up for that. But piety is all we have to offer.” “Or we can forget,” Indar said. “We can trample the past.” Raymond said, “That is what most of the leaders of Africa do. They want to build skyscrapers in the bush. This man wants to build a shrine.”

“Raymond tells a story well […] What he says about the President and ideas is certainly true. The President uses them all and somehow makes them work together. He is the great African chief, and he is also the man of the people. He is the modernizer and he is also the African who has rediscovered his African soul. He’s conservative, revolutionary, everything. He’s going back to the old ways, and he’s also the man who’s going ahead […] the mish-mash works because he keeps on changing, unlike the other guys. He is the soldier who decided to become an old-fashioned chief, and he’s the chief whose mother was a hotel maid. That makes him everything, and he plays up everything. There isn’t anyone in the country who hasn’t heard of that hotel maid mother.”

“We have to learn to trample on the past, Salim. I told you that when we met. It shouldn’t be a cause for tears, because it isn’t just true for you and me. There may be some parts of the world—dead countries, or secure and by-passed ones—where men can cherish the past and think of passing on furniture and china to their heirs […] Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain. It isn’t easy to turn your back on the past. It isn’t something you can decide to do just like that. It is something you have to arm yourself for, or grief will ambush and destroy you. That is why I hold on to the image of the garden trampled until it becomes ground—it is a small thing, but it helps.”

“I began to understand at the same time that my anguish about being a man adrift was false, that for me that dream of home and security was nothing more than a dream of isolation, anachronistic and stupid and very feeble. I belonged to myself alone. I was going to surrender my manhood to nobody. For someone like me there was only one civilization and one place—London, or a place like it. Every other kind of life was make believe. Home—what for? To hide? To bow to our great men? For people in our situation, people led into slavery, that is the biggest trap of all. We have nothing. We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves. ‘Here, take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater man yourself, for my sake!’ No! I want to be a man myself.”

“What place is there in the world for people like that? There are so many of them… What happens to these people? Where do they go? How do they live? Do they go back home? Do they have homes to go back to? You’ve talked a lot, Salim, about those girls from East Africa in the tobacco kiosks, selling cigarettes at all hours of the night… You say they don’t have a future and that they don’t even know where they are. I wonder whether that isn’t their luck. They expect to be bored, to do what they do. The people I’ve been talking about have expectations and they know they’re lost in London… The area is full of them, coming to the centre because it is all they know about and because they think it’s smart, and trying to make something out of nothing. You can’t blame them. They’re doing what they see the big people doing.”

That illumination I held on to, about the unity of experience and the illusion of pain, was part of the same way of feeling. We fell into it—people like Indar and myself—because it was the basis of our old way of life. But I had rejected that way of life—and just in time. In spite of the girls in the cigarette kiosks, that way of life no longer existed, in London or Africa. There could be no going back; there was nothing to go back to. We had to become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed. The younger Indar was wiser. Use the airplane; trample on the past, as Indar had said he had trampled on the past. Get rid of that idea of the past; make the dream-like scene of loss ordinary.