I thought it was to a point of rest like this that the Indian lawyer was taking me, that he was looking to a future beyond the current excesses of the president’s rule.
I said to him, “But how are you going to spend the next few years?”
He said with deliberation, “I will be doing everything I can every day to getting every shilling I possess out of the country.”
The lawyer was not without his family and caste sense for the accumulation of wealth. But he had become far more than a man of his caste. The charitable impulses of his faith — connected with the idea of merit and the good life — had been converted by him into a lifelong political idealism. He knew very well that to do what he had said would be to waste the little life that remained to him. But he was speaking seriously. The situation in the country was just as bad as it appeared, and he was talking out of despair and the knowledge, hard to bear at his age, of his own futility.
EDUCATION WAS free, and most of the students at the university were the first of their family or village to get higher education. They brought certain village habits to the campus. They could drink with a great, sullen seriousness for two or three days; and many of them did so when they got their monthly allowance from the government. They slept with their room lights on because they didn’t like sleeping in the dark. The students’ residential blocks blazed with electric light throughout the night, and a visitor might have thought that the students of this new African university were working night and day, to catch up.
In fact, some of the students brought fresh and sharp minds to the university. It was at the university they learned to be dull, through the political training they received: learning about the president’s thought and the principles of his African socialism. It was as though they had been brought from their villages to the university to be re-initiated, retribalized, given new taboos and made narrowly obedient again. At the end the successful ones were fit and ready to serve the president and the state; and this was just as well, because there was for them no other way of earning a livelihood.
This was the future they had to show themselves worthy of. They learned to walk out in a body during lectures given by visitors. Few of them could say why; all they knew was that the leader of their group had given a signal. This walking out on foreign lecturers was a form of aggression that got talked about by expatriates, and it appeared to corroborate an idea the tyranny promoted about itself: the country was moving fast under the president, but not fast enough for the students, who were getting impatient and angry, and pushing the president, almost against his will, into more revolutionary postures.
The students constantly demonstrated. They demonstrated against South Africa and Rhodesia. They demonstrated against those African countries whose rulers were critical of the president. And more and more now they demonstrated against the local Asian community for sending money abroad and sucking the country dry. The government newspaper reported these demonstrations and at the same time ran editorials asking the students to show restraint; though I felt sometimes that the newspaper was reporting demonstrations that hadn’t taken place.
Two or three years before, the president had invited a famous Hungarian economist down from London to advise on the socialist restructuring and unifying of the half colonial, half informal-African economy. Now the rumour began to go around that another foreign adviser was coming to look at ways of controlling the flow of money out of the country. Whenever he did radical or difficult things, or extended his own powers, the president didn’t like to appear to be acting on his own. He liked it to appear that he was only following good socialist precedent, and taking the advice of reputable people from reputable countries.
Richard stopped me on a path in the compound one day. He said with his seeming smile, “Do you know a man called Blair? He’s coming here, to keep us all in order.”
I could tell from Richard’s tone and the brightness in his eye that he was talking of the president’s new adviser.
He bit on his empty ivory cigarette-holder, flipping it up and down and then up again. “He’s from your part of the world. The story is he went to school with you. Used to be a minister. Now is a kind of roving ambassador. Soon you’ll have no secrets.”
And of course now I knew the name. Blair and I hadn’t gone to school together — that part of the story had been garbled. But his name was a name from the beginning of my adult life: for some months in 1949 we had both worked in a government department in the Red House in Port of Spain. I was playing at being a civil servant; he was entirely serious.
I was an acting second-class clerk, a copyist, filling in time and earning a little money before going to England and Oxford on the scholarship I had won. He was a new senior clerk in the department, a tall and grave black man who had made his way up. He sometimes came and sat beside me at my table at the end of a morning or afternoon, to check and initial the certificates I had written out.
He was more than ten years older than I, and in Trinidad that difference in age was important. It meant he had been born in a darker time. His education hadn’t been as straightforward as mine. He came from a poor family in a far-off country area and he had made a late start. That late start had put him at a disadvantage in the educational system. He had had to go to rough elementary schools and then to “private” high schools run by people with the barest qualifications. He would always have been too old for the better schools, and he would never have had the clear vision of a way ahead that had been given to me at an early stage: elementary school, exhibition to a secondary school, scholarship to a university abroad. He would have always had to feel his way. And when, after all of this, he had entered the government service, just before the war, his prospects were still limited; the senior posts were reserved for English people.
That had changed. He wasn’t thirty, but he was already a senior clerk, higher in the service than he could have imagined when he entered it. He intended to rise further: it was known that he was studying for an external London degree. And yet in the office I was seen as the man with the real future: Oxford, and a career in the wider world. Blair himself seemed to think so. He might have felt that in other circumstances his chances might have been more like mine, but he showed me no grudge. In Trinidad in the 1940s — before the full postwar opening up of the world for people, and while the society was still colonial — scholarship-winners received a special admiration; they were admired almost as much as cricketers. Blair offered me this admiration.
And then over the years things had evened out for us. My life abroad, so brilliant to think about in the Red House in Port of Spain, had turned out to be hard and mean. My career had taken many years to get started. I had had to learn to write from scratch, almost in the way a man has to learn to walk and use his body again after a serious operation. And even then after ten years I couldn’t feel secure, worrying always about finding matter for the next book, and then the one after that.
Whereas for Blair the world, so constricting when he had started, was soon to change dramatically. Even before I had published my first book, the new liberating politics of a Trinidad soon to be independent had come — with constant night meetings, like religious occasions, in the old British-Spanish colonial square next to the Red House — and Blair had been swept up to the heights, swept out of that government department where I had got to know him, swept out of that kind of government employment altogether, and into ministerial office: travel, ambassadorships, United Nations postings, and now this job for the president, reporting on the outflow of money. He had been born at the right time, after all.