IT WAS at De Groot’s bungalow that I at last met Blair. De Groot was a lecturer in African history at the university. He was about my own age. He had done a certain amount of original work on the Swahili culture of the coast, and his position at the university was far too modest. He had been moved aside once or twice for Africans, but he thought that in an African country this was as it should be, and he didn’t really mind. He had been born in East Africa and wanted to live nowhere else. That, in fact, was his principal ambition: to be always in Africa, to migrate nowhere else.
His father was a New Zealander who had gone to East Africa before the Great War. He was an engineer and builder and in East Africa he did small-scale construction work for the railways. His business failed during the Depression, and he lost the remainder of his money in his old age, when he quarrelled with his settler neighbours and started lawsuits against them. He had never been “a ‘settler’ settler,” to use his son’s words.
The same was true of the son (though he could mimic the settler voices); and he wasn’t much of anything else either. De Groot, the son, understood all attitudes in this part of Africa, and was detached from them all. He divided the expatriate lovers of Africa on the compound into “cob-cullers,” deer-hunters, people on an extended safari, and “matoke-eaters,” plantain-eaters, people who wanted to pretend for a while that they were Africans. He saw himself as belonging to neither group (though he knew that to some people he looked like a matoke-eater). He never defined himself, but I think his attitude was that he was simply a man in his own setting, and fascinated by everything in that setting. In Africa he had no special cause; people looking for a man with a cause found him incomplete.
He was a bachelor. He liked friends, conversation, stories, jokes. His bungalow was the standard compound bungalow and absolutely the same as mine, in dimensions and plan and fittings, but it seemed much nicer. It was at the edge of the compound, on slightly sloping ground, with a view at the back, beyond a dip, of unregulated bush outside the compound stretching away to the next slope. Most people in the compound decorated their rooms with standard African artifacts — drums, spears, shields, zebra-skin pouffes, carved figures. (The vendors came around constantly; I bought some rubbish myself in the early days.) De Groot had an African eye, and apparently simple objects in his sitting room — like a wooden comb from a particular tribe, with variegated light-catching patterns carved with a relish that made you feel you would like to do some wood-carving yourself — were things you could give attention to and constantly see afresh. But the main reason why De Groot’s bungalow was so attractive was because of the man himself. He was intelligent and quick, and without malice. He was completely open. You felt when you were with him that he took a delight in your character, your oddities, your presence.
(He was one of the people I thought I should go and see again before beginning this book. He had long ago left the university; he never said, but I believe life there had finally been made too hard even for him. Later he had done some semi-academic half-jobs; notes on Christmas cards had given me the vaguest ideas of those jobs. He had published a few things, but then he seemed to have drifted away from academic life altogether. I had no idea what he was doing when I wrote to him.
He misunderstood my letter: he thought I was going to be with him in a few days. He couldn’t come to meet me, he said; he was going to send his driver; he described the driver. He said he had run out of Earl Grey tea; he wanted me to bring him some. He had a little farm now. Things were still chaotic, but there were a lot of books and he thought I would be comfortable. I knew the area where the farm was. It was scrubland, dusty, not welcoming. I felt that “farm”—with its suggestions of fields and fruitfulness — might have been too big a word for what he had. I imagined his house as a rougher version, but in wilderness, of his compound bungalow.
He wrote a second letter. This was clearly the work of an inflamed brain: the writer thought I was going to walk through the door at any moment. The letter was on an air-letter form; half-way through, the handwriting, that to me was so full of his character, broke up. Though the letter had been addressed, it hadn’t been finished: some kind of failure had occurred during the writing, and he had saved his energy for the address.
De Groot had, in fact, written both letters from a hospital. I had written to him when he was dying. The planning and writing of a book can be attended by such coincidences.
For years after I left East Africa I used to think of going back one day to have another look, do the long drives. That idea had always assumed that De Groot would be there, to guide, interpret, pass me on to people, and give me the news. He would have been the man to whom I would have brought back my stories. Without him there was no point in going back. I wouldn’t have known how to move; it would have been another country.
I suppose it would have been possible twenty-five years before to foresee the shrinking of his life to the settler parody at the end. I know that worry about the future did come to him later. But while he was on the compound — still young and finding friends, and doing generous things like arranging the meeting between Blair and me — he was serene. The country had already begun to go very bad — and he knew it — but he was in the full joy of his African life.)
With his background De Groot would have understood the tensions between Blair and me. He didn’t have to be told anything. And when he said to me one day that he had met Blair and got on with him, and that I should meet him too, I knew at once that De Groot had been doing a little work and that such a meeting would be all right. Blair would have felt the same. So even before we met a kind of goodwill had been established.
We met late one afternoon on De Groot’s narrow back verandah, concrete-floored and perfectly open, just a few inches above the ground, with weathered wicker chairs and a low, bleached, ring-marked table, with a certain amount of junk pushed together in a corner against the kitchen wall. Beyond the little sloping strip of lawn — De Groot liked to water that — the land fell away, seemingly to bush; and from the hidden settlements below — settlements living off the compound — there came a sound of African voices.
In 1949, when I was seventeen, I had thought of Blair as a young man. Now he seemed to me middle-aged: he was close to fifty, and I was not yet thirty-four. The wonderful physique had thickened up; he seemed to be less neat in his movements, more assertive, to be taking up more room. Before I could think too much about that he put things right: he made the first gesture.
He said, “I tell people I saw you do your first piece of writing.” Then he addressed De Groot as well. “It was in the department where we both worked. He wrote an article about a black beauty competition. He showed it to one of the typists and she didn’t like it. She thought he mocked the black M.C. too much.” He gave a deep laugh. “As soon as I began to hear about it I recognized the fellow.”