Moses Lubero controlled the houseboys, and Richard kept an eye on the expatriates. Richard was English, a slender man in his thirties who used an ivory cigarette-holder. He invited people to dinner in his apartment when he felt they were straying. He worked for the planning department, but he was better known on the compound for the letters he wrote to foreign newspapers and magazines when they published critical things about the country and the president. He wrote not as an official but as a private person. He wrote of socialism as of an austere faith that was its own reward. He might say, “Why shouldn’t a poor African country be allowed to develop its own brand of socialism?” And he might say of the president: “He may not leave his country richer than he found it. But there isn’t only one way of measuring success, and this new man of Africa will have the satisfaction of having ruled according to his own high principles.”
Richard had an easy, self-mocking manner which made you feel that he was half on your side and that you could joke with him about what he had written. You couldn’t. He was humourless; he simply couldn’t take in a point of view that was different from his own.
One afternoon — I had sent the driver away for the day — I took the car out, to practise. I went on the airport road. It was the least busy of the roads around the capital. It went through no villages and it had a nice long straight stretch. On this stretch after some miles I saw a black-uniformed man on a motorcycle coming down towards me. And then I saw another uniformed man on a motorcycle. The men on the motorcycles were gesticulating. They appeared even to be half standing up on their bikes. When they came nearer I saw they were gesticulating at me. It became clear that they were furious with me, and it also became clear that they intended to drive me off the road. I pulled over on to the verge, without accident. Behind the motorcyclists was a big black car, and in the back seat were two men in off-the-shoulder African cloths. One of the men was the president. There was a smaller car behind, and behind that another motorcycle.
A few days later I saw Richard walking in his usual brisk way in the compound.
I said, “The other day the president drove me off the road.”
The fixed, meaningless smile left his face. He became severe. “You are making this up. You know you are making this up. The president doesn’t do that sort of thing.”
“That’s what I thought. But then I had never met him on the road before.”
“You can write what you want, of course. You have that freedom and you know it. The South African exiles here will certainly be grateful to you for your satire.”
He spoke satirically himself. The country offered ready asylum to political exiles from South Africa, and in the compound we had a number of them. They made a distinct, depressive element. A few of them were black; many more were white. The whites were unhappy, damaged people. They might have been damaged by defeat, or it might have been that exile had brought out the melancholy or incompleteness that had always been there in their natures, below their political cause. I had never known revolutionaries before, and I suppose I had theatrical ideas of what they would be like. These people on the compound — whom I saw from a distance, and whom I found hard to get to know — were not defiant or fierce or full of faith. They were more like people who had been dealt a bad hand, had taken a wrong turning, and who would somehow always be out of reach, always dealing with their private demons.
THE COUNTRY was full of a special hate. It was for the small Asian or Indian community who, as elsewhere in East Africa, were mainly traders and shopkeepers and made a closed group.
There would have been ancient connections between the coast and India. It was an East African pilot who showed Vasco da Gama the way to India. The Victorian explorer Speke even published a map, said to be based on old Hindu texts, giving Sanskrit names for the rivers, lakes and mountains of Uganda. There would have been an Indian element in the mixed Swahili culture of the coast But people didn’t carry this kind of history in their heads; and the Asian community that was hated was the more recent one that had come over and settled in the half century or so of British rule.
The hate was in the newspapers, in the parliament, in the compound, in the university. It was open; it was licensed; it brought about no retaliation. Expatriates dealt in it to show their own commitment to the country. Some political people saw it as part of the business of building socialism, and gave it a doctrinal gloss.
The Asian shops in the capital would have been drab enough with all the regulations about imports and foreign exchange. It didn’t take much to see that in the background there was a further constant plundering of the shopkeepers by officials, important men in the president’s party, blackmailers, and finance houses in England and elsewhere who were being used to get money out of the country. The shopkeepers, Hindu or Muslim, were stoical; this was the gift of both religions. They didn’t complain, and they wouldn’t have wanted to do so to outsiders. But the griefs of those shops, dark wooden or concrete boxes that attracted such hate, seemed a world away spiritually from the landscaped grounds of the compound and the even more splendid campus of the new university, which had been built with foreign aid and seemed to speak of foreign approval of what the president did.
It was well known that in his early political days the president had been helped financially by some people in the Asian community. The president himself sometimes mentioned this when he attended certain ceremonial Asian occasions. I met one of those helpers one day. He was in his sixties, heavy, ill-looking, his active life in the past. He came of a merchant family who had migrated to East Africa at the turn of the century. Unusually, he had not gone into the family business. He was a lawyer. Perhaps because of this Separation from family ways, and his isolation, he had been marked, more than most Indians I had met in India or East Africa, by the racial cruelty of pre-war East Africa. (It was the distorted echo of that cruelty that had in the beginning disturbed me even in the revolutionary compound, in the conventions about houseboys, their uniforms, their quarters.) It had been especially hard for him in the pre-war years, when he had felt himself caught between the humiliations of colonial East Africa and colonial India. After the independence of India he had devoted himself to the East African cause. He had got to know the president when the president was a schoolboy, and already famous, already spoken of as a leader. He had always admired the president; even now he admired him.
After he had talked of the excesses of the president’s rule — the cruelties in the villages, the harassment of the Asian community, the censorship of the press, the regimentation of the students in the university — the lawyer went back to talking of the qualities he had admired in the president. It was as though, in spite of everything he had said, he had reached a personal point of rest and reconciliation, and had a bright vision of the future. There were three or four British people like that on the compound, not old, and one or two with some family connection with Africa. They loved Africa for the landscape, the peoples, the mysteries of the religion, the animals, the spaces. They could live nowhere else, and they intended to stay, regardless of politics, as long as they were allowed.