We, the early arrivals, sat downstairs, in the loggia, amid the bougainvillaea. Everything had been swept and dusted that morning, but already everything, including the bougainvillaea, was dusty from the desertification. The sand was in the air. It fell fine all the time; it was something you felt below your shoes.
We were waiting for the principal. He was in the building, but he had arrived late, just an hour or so before, and he was upstairs getting ready. There had been some trouble earlier that morning, many kilometres away, with the rope-pulled ferry over some dwindling river. That had delayed him.
When thirty minutes or so later he came down the steps to the patio — from the room he had been given, the room the principal (and, before him, the chief missionary) had always been given — the smell of talcum powder preceded him. He was a big man, brown more than black, with a big, strongly modelled face with great ridges of cheekbones, a big, strong body, and big feet in big shoes. He was in an old and thin dark suit, sepia in patches from sunlight and wear and dry-cleaning fluid. He had been shaving; a dull white bloom — like the desert sand on the bougainvillaea — lay over the chin and cheeks he had been shaving very close.
He talked about the ferry and the bad road and the delay that morning. His words gave me a picture: the flat barge with the old Peugeot car, the shallow river issuing out of swamp, the morning heat-mist, the ferryman pulling on the slack rope or cable looped across the river, the principal standing tall and upright, and then the barge running aground.
The principal said, “Bad roads, primitive ferry. But these are the sacrifices we have to make for the next generation.”
A guest said, not wishing bad things to be said about Africa, “There are wonderful roads over the frontier.”
But that was like bad manners. The principal looked affronted. I thought there was something about his voice and manner and accent.
I said, “Has anyone told you, Principal? You have a West Indian accent.”
He said, with a curious gesture, in which I at once recognized the gestures of many people I knew in my childhood, “I am West Indian.”
His father had studied in London in the 1920s. He had become attracted to the Back-to-Africa views of Marcus Garvey and others; and he had done what many people had talked about but few had actually done. He had come out to West Africa, and had lived there until he died. All these years, this life in Africa!
Our hostess asked, “You would say that’s one reason why the Christian vocation came to you?”
The principal said, “I don’t know. We were Baptists in my family, but the reason why I wanted to go into the church was that when I was at school it seemed the only thing to do. I wanted to be like the men who taught me. The same is true for some black Roman Catholics I know. People of my background. I know an old West Indian man here who became a Roman Catholic priest. I asked him the same question you asked me. Just a few months ago. This old man said to me, ‘What else was there for me? The monastery was the only safe place I could see. And I thought it was nice. I thought they would send me to Ireland.’ That’s true for me too. It may be a vocation. I don’t know. I am a Baptist and a believer. But without colonialism I wouldn’t have had the vocation. I would have been another kind of believer. Let me say that too.”
Somebody said, “You’re talking like your president.”
The principal threw his big shoulders back and made a gesture with his open palms. And it was clear then that he was charged up, that he had come ready to speak for the regime, and ready to take on the criticisms of everyone at the table.
It wasn’t what we were expecting. We were expecting something quieter and more indirect, something that acknowledged the civility of the occasion, not something that imposed the silence of the hotel and the streets on us.
Someone said, “Do they still talk about the chiefs where you are?”
The principal said, “If they do, I haven’t heard it. Lebrun was right. The president was a prisoner of the cheferie. They were getting in the way of all his reforms. But the president didn’t know what would happen if he tried to take them on. Lebrun said very simply, ‘Take an axe to the root.’ Do it decisively, and they’ll all run. No more slavery, no more ritual murders, no more killing of wives and servants when a big chief dies. All the superstitions of feudalism wiped out in one blow. All the things that give Africa a bad name. ‘Take an axe to the root.’ I remember how the women and slaves used to run just before a big chief died. Everybody knew about it, but nobody talked about it. And that was exactly how the chiefs ran when the president brought in the people’s courts.” He made a West Indian gesture, to suggest flight, brushing one open palm glancingly off the other. “You were telling me about the good roads and the Lacoste shops and the lovely houses and the beach restaurants with cabarets and bananes flambés on the other side of the frontier. But the chiefs are still ruling there. The French are doing the job for them, but it is all for the chiefs. When something happens and the French go away, all of that feudal life will still just be there, waiting to terrorize people. Not here. You have the bad ferry, but you don’t have the chiefs now. The chiefs here used to say that they spoke for the people. All right. So let them be tried by the people’s courts. That was the president’s idea.”
I wanted to hear more about the people’s courts.
The principal said, “Highest form of democracy.” And he fitted a West Indian gesture to his words: he raised his open palms just above the edge of the table and threw his shoulders far back — as though to make room for the significance of his words. It was like a choreographed movement: a backward sway suddenly arrested: the most elegant of the movements he had been making at the lunch table.
The gift of speech, the beautiful, timed gestures of hands and upper body, the easy dominance of the lunch table: this took me back. It took me back to Lebrun talking in the cramped Lebanese flat in Maida Vale. And I wondered whether Lebrun’s visit here some months before hadn’t revived certain rhythms of speech in the principal.
But perhaps not. Perhaps this gift of speech and movement went back further, had another parentage, I went back in memory to the solicitors’ clerks in the Red House in Port of Spain, searching for property titles in the big bound books of the Registrar-General’s Department. They sat at the mahogany desks in the high jalousied rooms of the Italianate building and they gossiped and gestured in their conspiratorial fashion, like people with secrets. Make-believe, but just a few years later there were to be the meetings in the Victorian colonial square across the street, where ideas of racial redemption were offered as a kind of sacrament. The passions of that sacrament were proving to be unassuageable, and were now beyond control.
This French West African colonial building where I was now, listening to the principal — long table in the arcaded loggia, tablecloth, glasses, flowers, the fine sand and dust gathering slowly on walls and plants and on the tiled floor — was like the one on the other side of the Atlantic where the clerks had gossiped in their spacious search room: Italianate too, thick walls, with tall jalousied windows hinged at the top, propped open at the bottom just a little way to let in air and light and to give a view of the gardens outside, but to keep out the hot morning sun. Both buildings had been put up at about the same time, just after the turn of the century, at the zenith of empire.