PRIVATE ALARMS, perhaps. But the world had changed. Lebrun wasn’t being returned to his beginnings. The Caribbean was independent. Africa was independent. He had been around for a long time; he was known. And now, near the end, his underground reputation began to alter. At one time he had been the man of principle, the man of the true revolution; the various politicians of the Caribbean had been the men who had sold out. Now, with subtle addition, he became the man of true African or black redemption, the man of principle there, the man who had held out against all kinds of enticements to give up the cause, unlike the false black leaders.
So now he stepped in and out of his two characters, now the man of the revolutionary cause, now the man of racial redemption, the man always of principle. He appeared, in this new personality, to be going against the whole life of revolution he had lived; against the “political resolution” he had come to years before, the universality in which he had shed the burdens of race and shame; against the admiration of his New York supporters; against, even, the inscription to me, as to a fellow humanist, in the copy of The Second Struggle.
His name didn’t appear in books about Africa or the Caribbean; writers and publishers didn’t want to offend the rulers. This added to his prestige; he could be presented on the radio or the television, in the programmes on which he was called to give his opinion about this and that, as the hidden black prophet of the century. He looked the part; he was very old now, almost saintly, the man without possessions.
He never spoke against a black racial regime. He presented Asian dispossession in Amin’s Uganda and Nyerere’s Tanzania as an aspect of class warfare. Guyana in South America he defended in a curious way: since the days of slavery, he said on one radio programme, the Caribbean could be considered as black people’s territory. He put this racial statement in a vast, categorizing way — very much in the manner of the old Lebrun — on a television programme. He said, “The day the first African slave was landed, the region became black territory. If they had known that was going to happen, they might have thought twice.”
It was as though at the very end of his life he had found the role he had been working towards since the beginning. He was the black spokesman of the century, offering not the gross semi-mystical redemption of the politician of the islands, but something higher and more universal, something which had elements of historical inevitability: a little like the view he had offered me in his article on my books in the Russian magazine in 1960.
In his new role he began to make African pilgrimages. In the 1920s and 1930s a number of educated people of Lebrun’s generation had joined the Back-to-Africa movement. As a revolutionary he had disapproved; he had thought the movement sentimental and escapist. He acknowledged that, but he said the world had changed.
He went to Africa as a famous black man. He was welcomed by the leaders; his reputation began to feed on itself. He was said to be advising. He went to all kinds of tyrannies; to countries of murderous tribal wars; to collapsed economies. But when he came back he spoke on the television and radio as though he had been granted a vision of something more ideal, an Africa stripped of all that was incidental and passing: like the vision his New York supporters had been given years before, of latent pure revolution, in the West Indian islands.
He never tried to stay in the places he had visited. He always came back to his base, in England, Europe, Canada. He had learned his lesson from the West Indian islands in the 1950s and 1960s, and wished to threaten no one.
It was a kind of fulfilment for him. It was not to be begrudged. I thought his vision of Africa a harmless fantasy. Then I had a letter from a friend, a writer, in a French-African territory.
Paul wrote, “A funny thing. A black American poet passed through. A grand old man, a proper GOM. The USIS asked me to chair the meeting. But I didn’t want to see the old soak drink. And then your friend Lebrun came, on his own. Looking very grand and wise. The Brits did a little show for him. He began to lecture us about the way Africa had been politicized, in defiance of Marx. That was surprising to me. I thought the man was a communist. Then something happened. He couldn’t bear the sight of the young French coopérants, prancing about in Africa, as he thought, and he didn’t like the sight of the African women of the university with their white boy friends. He began to threaten everybody, in a quiet way. He went wild, and then he calmed down.”
The man with the New York friends, in the old days, and the New York manner, the hard-won political resolution. The old man wild in free Africa, expressing old hurt.
II
NOT LONG after, with no thoughts of Lebrun in my head, and simply to satisfy an old urge, I went myself to French-speaking West Africa for the first time.
And there the French language developed a whole new set of associations for me.
The earliest association the language had had for me — as a child in Trinidad, and not long after I had come to Port of Spain — had been with prisoners escaping in open boats from the prison colony on Devil’s Island off French Guiana. Sometimes their boats drifted on to Trinidad. They were allowed to stay for three days, I believe. They were photographed and interviewed by the Trinidad Guardian and the Evening News; the local people gave food and water and other gifts; and then they were sent on their way again.
At about the same time there was my first-year study of French at Queen’s Royal College. Queen’s Royal was a famous island college. To go there from an intermediate school was not only to make a big academic jump, but also to be more grown up. The study of French was like part of the excitement and elegance of the place.
A lot of what I felt about the French language was given me by my teacher. He was a young man, but with the neatness and formality of someone older. Before he sat down at the master’s table he always greeted the class: “Good morning, boys.” The handkerchief he took out to pat his forehead and mouth and neck on a hot day always remained folded. He came from a well known black family. They were professional, cultured people. That represented a considerable effort, in our colonial setting: there were not many like them.
This teacher loved the French language and French ways, and I heard that he and other members of his family used to spend time in Martinique, the French West Indian island to the north. (This would have been before the war; during the war the French islands were Vichy and out of bounds.) They went for the language, the foreignness, the stylishness, the cafés where you could ask the waiter for pen and paper and write letters at your table. In Trinidad (where the restaurants were Chinese and rough and disreputable-feeling, with tables in separate cubicles) we didn’t have these metropolitan touches. They also went for the racial freedom. I heard it said by many people that in Martinique and Guadeloupe a black man of culture was treated as an equal.
All of this was associated with the language. I transferred it even to the pre-war Siepmann’s French Reader that we used, with French texts on the left-hand pages and, on the right-hand pages, lovely full-page pen drawings of French scenes — streets, gardens, fields — by H. M. Brock.
These were among the ideas and French associations that I took to Martinique — nearly twenty years after Siepmann—when I was travelling for my first travel book. And in less than a week all the stored fantasy connected with the French language, from that early time, fell away. I found a little island that seemed to have been scraped clean of its original vegetation (Trinidad had large tracts of primal forest in the northern hills, and primal swamps), scraped clean and cropped and cropped: small views from the narrow winding roads, but not cosy views, a little island showing its serf past, over-cultivated, socially and racially over-regulated, even obsessed, small, constricted, pressing down on everyone, unconscious cruelty in everyone’s speech. This was a place you wanted to get away from.