All down the coast, the Arabs of Muscat and Oman, the previous settlers, had become fully African. They had ceased to be Arabs and were known locally only as Mohammedans. Ana's grandfather, living that hard life in that hard country, and knowing no other, had himself become half African, with an African family. But while for the African Arabs of the coast history had not moved for generations, and they had been allowed to stay what they had become, history began unexpectedly to quicken around Ana's grandfather. There was the great 1914 war in Europe. Ana's grandfather made a fortune then. More settlers came out to the country; the capital developed; there were trams, with white people (and Goans) at the front and Africans at the back, behind a canvas barrier. Ana's grandfather wished, in this period, to recover the European personality he had shed. He sent his two half-African daughters to Europe to be educated; it was no secret that he wished them to marry Portuguese. And he built his big estate house, with white concrete walls and red concrete floors. There was a big garden at the front and side, and a line of verandahed guest rooms running off the main verandah at the back. Each guest room had its own big bathroom with the fittings of the day. The servants' quarters were extensive; they were at the very back. He bought the fine colonial furniture that was still around us. We slept in his bedroom, Ana and I, on his high carved bed. If it was hard to enter the personality of the man who had become half African, it was harder to be at ease with this later personality, which should have been more approachable. I always felt a stranger in the house. I never got used to the grandeur; the furniture seemed strange and awkward right to the end.
And, with my background, always in such a situation scratching at me, I couldn't forget the Africans. Ana's grandfather, and the others, and the priests and nuns of the frightening pretty foreign mission, old-fashioned in style, that had been set down, just like that, in the open, bare land, all of these people would have thought the right thing was to bend Africans to their will, to fit them for the new way. I wondered how they had set about that, and was afraid to ask. Yet somehow the Africans had stayed themselves, with many of their traditions and much of their own religion, though the land around them had been parcelled out and planted with crops they were required to tend. Those people walking on either side of the asphalt road were much more than estate labour. They had social obligations which were as intricate as those I knew at home. They could without warning take days off estate work and walk long distances to pay a ceremonial call or take a gift to someone. When they walked they didn't stop to drink water; they appeared not to need it. In the matter of eating and drinking they still at that time followed their own old ways. They drank water at the beginning of the day and then at the end, never in between. They ate nothing at the beginning of the day, before they went out to work; and the first meal they had, in the middle of the morning, was of vegetables alone. They ate their own kind of food, and most of what they ate was grown in the mixed planting just around their huts. Dried cassava was the staple. It could be ground into flour or eaten as it was. Two or three sticks of it could keep a man going all day when he went on a journey. In the smallest village you could see people selling dried cassava from their little crop, a sack or two at a time, gambling with their own need in the weeks to come.
It was strange when you got to see it, those two different worlds side by side: the big estates and the concrete buildings, and the African world that seemed less consequential but was everywhere, like a kind of sea. It was like a version of what— in another life, as it seemed—I had known at home.
By a strange chance I was on the other side here. But I used to think, when I got to know more of the story, that Ana's grandfather wouldn't have liked it if he had been told at the end of his life that someone like me was going to live in his estate house and sit in his fine chairs and sleep with his granddaughter in his big carved bed. He had had quite another idea of the future of his family and his name. He had sent his two half-African daughters to school in Portugal, and everyone knew that he wanted them to marry proper Portuguese, to breed out the African inheritance he had given them in the hard days when he had lived very close to the land with less and less idea of another world outside.
The girls were pretty and they had money. It was no trouble for them, especially during the great Depression, to find husbands in Portugal. One girl stayed in Portugal. The other, Ana's mother, came back to Africa and the estate with her husband. There were lunches, parties, visits. Ana's grandfather couldn't show off his son-in-law enough. He gave up his bedroom, with its extravagant furniture, to the couple. So as not to be in the way, he moved to one of the guest rooms at the rear of the main building; and then, out of a greater tact, he moved to one of the overseers' houses some distance away. After some time Ana was born. And then, little by little, in that bedroom to which I woke up every morning, Ana's father became very strange. He became listless and passive. He had no duties on the estate, nothing to rouse him, and some days he never left the room, never left the bed. The story among the mixed-race overseers, and our neighbours—and, inevitably, it got to me not long after I arrived—was that the marriage that had looked good to Ana's father in Portugal looked less good in Africa, and he had become full of resentment.
Ana knew the stories that were told about her father. She said, when we began to talk about these things, “It was true, what they said. But it was only part of the truth. I suppose when he was in Portugal he thought, apart from everything else, apart from the money, I mean, that it would help him, going out in a privileged way to the new country. But he wasn't made for the bush. He was never an active man, and his energy level fell when he came here. The less he did, the more he hid in his room, the lower his energy fell. He felt no anger for me or my mother or my grandfather. He was just passive. He hated being asked to do very simple things. I remember how his face would twist with pain and anger. He really was someone who needed help. As a child I thought of him as a sick man and his bedroom as a sickroom. It made my childhood here very unhappy. As a child I used to think, about my father and my mother, ‘These people don't know that I'm a person, too, that I too need help. I'm not a toy they just happened to make.'”
In time Ana's parents began to live separate lives. Her mother lived in the family house in the capital, looking after Ana while she was at the convent school there. And for many years no one outside the family knew that anything was wrong. It was the pattern in colonial days: the wife in the capital or one of the coastal towns looking after the education of the children, the husband looking after the estate. Usually, because of this repeated separation, husbands began to live with African women and have African families. But the other thing happened here: Ana's mother took a lover in the capital, a mixed-race man, a civil servant, high up in the customs, but still only a civil servant. The affair went on and on. It became common knowledge. Ana's grandfather, near the end of his life now, felt mocked. He blamed Ana's mother for the bad marriage and everything else. He felt her African blood had taken over. Just before he died he changed his will. He gave to Ana what he had intended to give to her mother.