It would have been a slow fading away for her. At the time of her death Miranda, once so important and busy in London, was hardly a name. His three boxes of papers had apparently been lost; and, as with the corpses at Pompeii, where Miranda should have been in historical accounts there was a void. Sarah vanished with him. The date of her death, and even the fact that she had kept on living at Grafton Street, was uncovered by a researcher from the Venezuelan embassy in London only in 1980.
Miranda’s papers were found more than a hundred years after his death. In the second decade of this century an American scholar, William Robertson, had the idea that (though the money and the gold had been seized) Miranda’s papers might have been sent on from Curaçao to London, to the appropriate British minister; and that they might subsequently have become part of the minister’s own archive. The appropriate minister in 1812 was Lord Bathurst, secretary of state for war and the colonies. In 1922 the sixty-three volumes of Miranda’s papers were identified by Robertson in the Bathurst library in Cirencester in Gloucestershire. Perhaps a speck or two of Venezuelan dust still adhered to them from the two three-hour journeys they had made more than a hundred years before on the cart road between Caracas and La Guaira. The papers were acquired by the Venezuelan government, and then made their last journey to Caracas.
The first volumes, heavily edited, with many things suppressed or omitted, were published in Caracas in 1924. The final volumes were published in Havana in 1950 for the bicentenary of Miranda’s birth. These Havana volumes, in which the papers appear just as Miranda preserved them, the ephemeral mixed up with more formal things, without editorial gloss or interference, seem still warm with the life of the man.
9. Home Again
THE FIRST black African country I went to was in East Africa. I was in my early thirties. I was loosely connected with the local university, and I lived in a little low bungalow in the landscaped grounds of a government compound on the edge of the town. Most of the people in the compound were expatriates — mostly British, with a few Americans — serving the government in various ways. Some were directly employed by the government; others had been sent out (like me) by foreign foundations or aid agencies.
The country was newly independent and was thought of as revolutionary, but the compound still had a colonial feel. It made me think of the expatriate compounds of the Trinidad oilfields, and it probably had been laid out at about the same time, between the wars.
The bungalows and flats in both places were quite modest. It was the setting — the many acres of landscaped grounds — that made them special, suggesting separateness and privilege. The land seemed to have been scraped clean of haphazard local bush. There were no internal fences, no middens that showed, no junk, no obvious patches of waste ground. The open spaces between houses were grassed. Every local tree and shrub, however common outside, cassia, coconut, flamboyant, hibiscus, seemed in this stripped enclosure to have an extra, exotic beauty.
The idea of privilege — or protection: almost the same thing — was not wrong. The East African compound was like a little welfare state within the country. There was a whole side of life we didn’t have to worry about. A special department looked after the flats and bungalows. It did repairs and replacements and attended to complaints. And though it wasn’t part of the official deal or issue, nearly everyone who came soon got a servant or houseboy who was used to the ways of the compound.
I was self-conscious with these servants in the beginning. I was embarrassed by the idea itself: African servants in East Africa — settler country in parts, still, and safari country as well — came with too many associations from books and films. But then I saw that most people on the compound, even the servants, were living unnatural lives. Everyone had been presented with a style — in some ways as formal as that of an Oxford college — that couldn’t exist outside. After a time the idea came to me that it might have always been like that on the compound, even in colonial days.
Because the compound was on the edge of the town and there were no buses or taxis, I had to have a car. And because I couldn’t drive, or didn’t trust myself with a car, I had to have a driver. It would have been convenient if one man could have done the driving for me and the cooking and the looking after the bungalow, but in the compound it didn’t work like that. I had to have a professional driver.
Just after breakfast the man would come, respectable and neat in creased trousers and clean shirt and shining shoes, and ask about the day’s programme. Most of the time I didn’t have a going-out programme. I was working in my bungalow. So he would sit in the kitchen and wait, at first looking up whenever I passed the open doorway, then conscientiously looking down. He took later to bringing comic books, magazines, and then proper books to the kitchen; he wrote letters. Sometimes in the morning I sent him home for the day, and then a few hours afterwards I wanted to get out. Compound life, with all its privileges, had its complications.
The servant and the driver had been found for me by Moses Lubero, who worked as a houseboy for a young English couple some houses away. Lubero was a heavy, slow man with bright, rolling eyes. I sometimes saw him with clothes-pegs in his mouth hanging out baby clothes. Baby clothes! Lubero was more important than that. He was said to control the houseboys on the compound. When he was out and about and he heard or saw my car coming he did a slow swivel of the neck and a very slow roll of his eyes to consider the car and me and the driver. It was as though there was something wrong with the muscles of his neck; but it might just have been his way of letting us know that he was keeping an eye on things.
He wore the standard houseboy whites: a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. From a distance they made him look like a fat boy. As you got nearer, his appearance changed: the fat boy wasn’t a boy at all. He was a middle-aged man who had seen much; there were deep lines from his cheekbones to the corners of his mouth, and frown lines on his forehead. The paunch — creasing the waistband of his white shorts — didn’t suggest softness. It suggested strength, authority, self-regard. Close to, he didn’t look friendly; he had an air of tribal authority. His surname indicated that he came from the centre of the continent; a grandfather or someone further back might have followed an Arab or Indian trader down to the coast and become beached there.
To control the houseboys on the compound was to have power. The jobs were better paid than comparable jobs in the town, and every bungalow or flat had well-maintained “quarters,” a servant room; many people in the town would have liked those quarters. There was also, with expatriates coming and going, a whole system of trade in the cast-off goods. The houseboys were controlled in other ways. It was Lubero who arranged everything when my own servant bought a broken-down old bicycle (borrowing through Lubero to do so, and also buying ill-fitting white-rimmed plastic shades to go with his new bicycle style).
THE COUNTRY was a tyranny. But in those days not many people minded. Africa had just begun to be independent, and the reputation of the president was that of a good man using his authority only to build socialism.
There was a section of the expatriates who saw themselves as serving this cause. It was one of the things that had attracted them to the country. They liked their closeness to power, and their simple but protected lives on the compound; though it worried them that they had to have the houseboys — they talked about that. Some of them even liked the idea of the shortages and austerity outside, and the disciplining of the people. They thought it was what had to come before things became better. They thought it right that people in the villages should be prevented from migrating to the capital. In this way the town didn’t grow, people were protected from the corruptions of town life, and it was easier for villages to be collectivized and returned to the socialism of traditional African ways. I think now that for these expatriates compound life would have provided something of what ashram life or the life of the religious commune provided for others elsewhere: liberation, new rigidities, a new self-awareness and self-cherishing.