“He was staying in a police building in a sealed room with an air-conditioning unit. It was very cold in the room. He was in a dirty peasant’s cloth and without his gold. Nothing shining on his skin. It was his idea of a disguise. The terror was still in his eyes.
“ ‘Me, me,’ he kept on saying. ‘A man of the cheferie—they were going to put me on the diète noire.’ You know about that famous black diet, don’t you? They put you in a cell without food or water and leave you to die. It’s what the president does to his enemies. I had heard about it when I was there. But I will tell you that it was another one of the things I heard about and didn’t believe in. I saw now, for the first time, that my little chief had always known about it. And I was shocked by that.
“Through the sealed window you could see the flat, hot countryside. Very strange. The trees, even when they were far away, didn’t bunch together. They were just standing one by one, like poles. The dust was like mist. It was the famous desertification people came to see and write reports about. It was what he had been driving through all night, and the Mercedes hadn’t broken down.
“He never asked me about myself. He never asked me how I had come to the strange country myself, or got my job or how I’d managed all these years. He never thanked me for taking his telephone call or arranging his asylum or driving down to see him. He expected me to treat him well. He was a chief, you see. He was full of his own sufferings and betrayal and his bravery in doing the long night drive. All the way up to the capital he complained like a child. He said his family had always supported the president. They had sent him to school and looked after him and his family. They had stood by him when the president had kicked out the French and there had been all that trouble. And then the president’s mind had been poisoned against the cheferie. Everyone knew who had done that. It was Lebrun, the antillais. Lebrun had bewitched the president. He had flattered him and turned his head. It was Lebrun, Lebrun — the little chief was obsessed with him.”
I had heard many things about Lebrun’s trip to French West Africa. But I hadn’t heard before that he had had any local political influence.
Phyllis said, “It is what people say. He was very angry when he left here, and I suppose when he went across the border they would have received him with open arms. They did a lot of anti-French propaganda with him.”
I said to Phyllis, “You said the little chief was on your mind.”
“With the help of the embassy we’ve been getting some of his money out from the country. We’ve arranged his papers, and he’s getting restless now. He’s forgotten some of his terror. He is talking of going to Paris. He’s got a lot of money there. And these past few days I’ve been thinking, ‘Yes, he’ll go to Paris now, and he’ll pick up some other woman and dazzle her with his chief’s talk and it’ll begin all over again.’ ”
THE TIME came for me to move on. The next stage of my journey was the dictatorship next door. This was the country Phyllis had come out to, the country that had kicked the French out, with all their aid and coopérants, and had, as some people said, gone back to bush.
So, without premeditation, I was following in the footsteps of Lebrun. Phyllis had names for me in the other country. There was someone there she especially wanted me to meet. This person, she said, would give me an idea of the true Africa, the Africa that the newspapers didn’t write about.
The day before I left she came to the hotel to say goodbye. We sat out on the terrace. A tourist feature had been made of the lagoon, which in the old days was famous for its mosquitoes and disease.
She said things she had said often before, about Africa, about the false ideas brought by black people from the West Indies and the United States. She was killing time, I could see. And then, just before she left, she did what she had come to do: she opened her handbag and gave me an envelope with banknotes. The money was for the man she wanted me to see. Life was hard for people over there, she said.
It was a roundabout journey. Political stresses had made a direct flight between the two neighbouring countries impossible. A plane to a neutral country to the north; a breakdown, a long wait at night in an open shed at the edge of an airfield, local police lounging with the passengers; traders in dingy gowns sitting on sacks of cheap rubber shoes and other goods; and then the shaky final trip to the dictatorship.
There were many policemen at the airport. It wasn’t a busy place. The arrival of this small plane was the big event of the morning, and the eyes of the idle officials glittered at the thought of the money to be made from the few people who had come in. It was a shed of an airport hall, with old, blown-up photographs of what must have been local scenes, relic of an earlier time of tourist promotion. I would have had trouble getting Phyllis’s money for her friend through — everything had to be declared, and some people were searched by customs officers trembling with excitement. But the man in front of me was detained so long — he was even taken off at one stage to a cubicle — that I was waved through by a senior officer anxious to close down the desks for the morning and go home.
The climate was similar to the climate of the other place. But, strangely, the light and heat that were part of the life and excitement and crowd of the other place here felt, right away, like tropical or African torpor. The newish airport highway, unmaintained, and cracked in many places, ran through bare red earth. No villages were to be seen, only big boards with sayings of the president’s, and large signs, facing the highway, as though they were meant only for visitors: INCREASE PRODUCTION.
It was strange to think of Lebrun coming here with his daughter; and, in extreme old age, after having gone back on so many of his old views, being received with honour, and finding a kind of revolutionary fulfilment. INCREASE PRODUCTION — it was like coming across a little bit of the raw material, part of the facts and figures and tables, of one of Lebrun’s old communist articles, in which this kind of “production” was better than the other sort of wealth.
The hotel, one of an international chain, was not very full. The air-conditioning was fierce, and the room I had was damp and musty, with a touch of rust on some bits of unprotected metal. I felt it hadn’t been occupied for some time. Everything was very expensive; the exchange rate was absurd. The bar and lounge and other public rooms were full of plain-clothes policemen in dark glasses, as though, in this already desolate place, their principal function was to catch out visitors.
I eventually got Phyllis’s friend on the telephone. He exclaimed when I gave Phyllis’s name. But then he became nervous; he became even more nervous when he heard where I was staying. He said he would telephone me back.
The hotel was silent. No one raised his voice. And I felt something of that stillness when some days later I went to an embassy lunch. The embassy building was really a government building of the colonial time; and the lunch to which I had been invited — a last-minute guest — was something of a local occasion.
In colonial days the head of the up-country Christian missions paid an annual official visit to the capital, and was received in some style by the governor. The lunch was an adaptation, or relic, of that colonial ceremony. There wasn’t a governor now: there was the ambassador of the former colonial power. And what had been the governor’s house was now the ambassador’s residence. As for the mission stations — the very words came from the turn of the century — they had gone through many transformations even in colonial times. The main station had become a medical centre, a hospital, a general training centre, a polytechnic. Its missionary associations — which had become more ecumenical — were now underplayed, and the representative who came for the ceremony in the capital was, officially, the principal of the polytechnic. This year, for the first time, the principal was a black man; he was said to be a Baptist. This was the special little drama of the lunch.