The principal had grown up in Africa. But he had grown up with his father’s story and all the passions, from the other side of the ocean, of the Back-to-Africa movement. In the West Indies his body movements and the rhythms of his speech would have been considered African or black. Here, though, they made him recognizably a man apart.
At the lunch table he continued to talk, holding the attention of all and imposing silence on alclass="underline" like a theatrical figure with his size and his faded dark suit, the white razor-bloom on his cheeks and chin, and the dusting of talcum powder around his collar: rocking with his big body from the waist up, and making gestures, at times like a dancer’s, with his open palms.
“The president hasn’t put his hand on anybody, whatever the propagandists say from across the frontier. It’s all been done by the people’s courts. They are the guardians of the country. Every street and every city block and every village has its own people’s court. That’s where the chiefs were tried. By their own people, the people who allegedly loved them. You can’t get a higher form of democracy than that.”
And then the principal began to look down at the table, began to go silent, gave up his body dance; and something began to happen to his face. It began to change. Like some actors who, at the end of a performance, continue for some time to have their face set in the role they have just taken, and then, almost visibly, begin to return to themselves, so the principal began to alter. He was like a man beginning to understand the nature of the embassy lunch, beginning to understand the dignity he represented; beginning to under stand how old attitudes of survival had led him away from that dignity.
He went silent. He looked down at the tablecloth without seeming to see anything. He made no dancer’s movement, no gesture with his palms.
He was supposed to stay some days at the embassy, as his predecessors had done. But the principal didn’t stay. He left in the Peugeot soon after the lunch, and I heard later from my embassy hosts that he never came back. So with the first black principal a little colonial tradition fell away.
MY MEETING with Phyllis’s friend took place in a café in the main square. It wasn’t easy to arrange. Twice he cried off; and he never wanted to come to the hotel. “Those people there don’t like me,” he said. So when at last we met it was in the old French colonial square. It was run-down, ghostly, with buildings no longer serving the purposes for which they had been built. The café, done in red, with folding red-painted metal chairs at metal tables, was between dingy shops with goods from the communist countries, things like tinned fruit from Vietnam.
In spite of the parked police vans, the area was dangerous with aggressive beggars and cripples and men, still young, who had been deliberately deformed as children. The first time I had gone there I had been mugged, near the newsstand with old newspapers from the communist countries. This had happened in the middle of the morning, coffee time, café-dawdling time. The French colonial square encouraged these ideas, but this was a ghost square: little traffic, no dawdlers. The muggers were a gang of youths and children, apparently beggars, appearing from nowhere, the children suddenly surrounding me and throwing themselves at my feet, turning up to me — as in a famine film clip — pleading, starving, pared-down African faces, plucking at the same time now at my shoe laces, now at my trousers, and appearing to mimic the gestures of hunger and eating, as they had been trained to do by the beggar-master, going through their routine very fast, to confuse the foreign victim and distract his attention from the bigger and more skilled pickpockets.
But these criminals in the square were the only local people I had seen who behaved like free people. They moved about a lot, and they moved fast, whether whole or crippled, the crippled on wheeled boards, like wider skate-boards, or in little box carts, like home-made toys. They shouted and spoke loudly among themselves, as though they didn’t have to be as quiet as everybody else.
Their apparent leader was a young man both of whose legs had been cut off at mid-thigh. Flat round wooden pads two or three inches thick had been strapped on to the base of his stumps; these pads, more or less the diameter of his stumps, were further cushioned or shod with black discs of rubber or leather. When he walked, these thick stumps were all movement; but each step was small, a child’s step, and the torso above the busy stumps moved very slowly. The malevolence in the face of this half-destroyed man, his contempt for the world, was unsettling; and I wondered whether some religious or magical idea, of the dictator’s, about the powers of deformity wasn’t behind this licensed display in the square.
Phyllis’s friend was waiting, as he had promised, in the café with the red-painted metal tables and chairs. He was at a corner table and was reading the local paper. He was a handsome, sinewy man, in his forties, in features and physique and skin-colour more West Indian than African.
I felt, as soon as we began to talk, that there was something Phyllis had left out in her story of her married life here with the little chief. I felt she had liked this man very much and wanted, even at this distance and after all this time, to show him off to me. And there was a touch of vanity in him too, at being recognized as the man Phyllis had liked.
When he heard that Phyllis had given me some money for him he lost control of his smile. It became a grimace; and he made a curious series of dismissing sounds. I felt he had had subsidies like this from women before. I felt it was a way of life he knew. And that expression — tight, unsmiling, unreliable — stayed on his face when I told him that Phyllis had said he would give me an idea of the true Africa.
He spoke of wise men he knew, both in the town and the villages, and the magical tricks they would perform for me, if he asked them. These men would disappear in front of my eyes. They would go through solid walls. They would slash their hands and blood would pour from the wounds; and then they would so heal the wounds that no scar would show. They would perform staggering feats of telepathy, entering houses and minds in many continents.
It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I had thought, from what she had said, that Phyllis had developed some feeling for the antiquity of tribal ritual; and some idea as a result, stronger than any she had had as an antillaise, of her grip on the world. I might have read too much in what she said. This man was like the con-man of African hotel lounges, offering hippy-style magic to travellers. Perhaps she had known very little of Africa when she had become involved with this man. Perhaps memory had added to him. Perhaps she had become profounder in the other country. Or perhaps this man had answered so many of her needs here — comforter, lover, astrologer, magician — that she had not really been able to judge him.
I wanted to leave the man. But, after this talk of magic, he wanted to stick to me. He came out to the square with me and — strong, elegant, easy in his movements, very attractive — he began to walk back with me to the hotel. The beggars saw us and squawked at us; some of them raced up aggressively in their carts; the man with the padded stumps drove them away.
Phyllis’s friend said as we walked, as though he wanted to live up to what Phyllis had said about him, “You get only the bad news about Africa in the European papers. The wars and the famines. But I will tell you. There are seven sacred spots in Africa. All the forces of the continent are concentrated on those seven spots. There is a holy man in each one of those spots. Every month these holy men meet and arrange the destiny of Africa.”