What was Denoon, by the way? I wondered: what class, what background? Denoon was just an Irish surname to me, and there were no particular indicia glaring at me. Of course a nice thing for him was that as a celestial intellectual he was now hors class. I had to remind myself that the information I wanted was not obtainable by staring.
It was time to resume.
A FARCE WRITTEN IN HUMAN BLOOD:
THE DESTRUCTION OF AFRICA ACCELERATED
BY HER BENEFACTORS, PRESENT COMPANY
NOT EXCEPTED
ACT TWO
DENOON:
Now I know very well if I say the word socialism I’m talking about a commodity that’s fairly popular in some quarters hereabouts. Understandably.
A CLAQUE OF YOUTH FROM THE BOTSWANA SOCIAL FRONT:
Hyah hyah!
Semiparodic rendering of the cry Hear hear as heard in the Parliament of Botswana.
DENOON:
Ehé. But just because I was so uncomplimentary about what capitalism is doing to Africa I hasten to not leave the impression I embrace socialism as a remedy, just in the event anyone here might think that.
A MARXIST, ISAAC MBAAKE, YOUTH SECRETARY OF THE BOTSWANA SOCIAL FRONT:
Never mind, because we all know what you are for. You are for suigenerism, so you must never suppose you can be surprising to us. He finished with his famous hacking laugh, a trademark.
A SWEDE:
I think no one was interrupting until now, isn’t it? I think we can all put questions in good time.…
DENOON:
No, it’s fine, it’s just all right. I know Isaac. We’re comrades. He wouldn’t say it, but I say it. Interruption is just all right, but in moderation, comrades.
Ehé. First I always say I am not the enemy of any system per se. I collect systems. I am an agnostic about systems, but I love them. What I say is we should ask the same questions of every system we consider. What are its fruits, number one, and two or even possibly number one, How much compulsion of individuals is required in order to keep it working.
Voilà, here was the famous voice, a bass baritone with a beautiful grain to it, as advertised. What an asset! But even better was that he seemed to have no idea what he had. When I alluded to it for the first time, down the line, it barely detained him. He was pleased enough and he did remember that there were people who had said something like what I was saying, but even as I was complimenting him his mind was moving on to something else. There are actors who have magnificent voices, but it means nothing because you know that they know how beautiful their voices are: Stuart Whitman is one. When they talk it’s as though they have their voice on a leash, like a borzoi they’re taking to the dog show.
There was more about having the right attitude to systems. There was for example a great book called Guild Socialism Restated, not that he was a guild socialist.… People should be pluralists and take what was good from one system if it passed certain tests.… All systems are ensembles or mosaics.
What he was doing was well-intentioned but pro forma. He stayed too long with this.
DENOON:
So then, just to balance my books, I want to give the five most serious objections to the socialist remedy for Africa, but by socialism I mean what the comrades mean — the orthodox model you find in Cuba or East Germany or Burma or that you had until lately in Guinea. I think this was the area where he lost everyone with a pun about Cuban socialism being social cubism.
But he would not get to it. He was too proleptic and too ingratiating. The comrades were supposed to be glad that there were only five objections, whereas he had given nine objections to capitalism. He thought it was nine. Then everybody was to remember that if socialism came to Africa, it would be to an Africa already three quarters integrated into the world capitalist system, the point being that making socialism was not like going to a desert island with your best friends and starting de novo. He was driving us mad with caveats. And by the way did the comrades know that Karl Marx had never set foot in a factory?
DENOON:
Every student who writes for UBScope ends his or her article with FORWARD WITH SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM in big letters.
But then the article writers go forward into the civil service, never to be heard from on this subject again, except to keep a certain flame burning in their hearts and maybe to vote for Botswana Social Front sometimes, for Boso.
I am saying that people who say socialism and nothing but socialism are using that as a pretext for doing nothing — and, worse, in the meantime they are reaping the fruits that fall to them as a class to whom capitalism directs its benefits even as it drives the mass of the people into worse misery than before.
And I am saying that if by magic one day the streets turn into rivers of fists and the people themselves come to the guys who today are shouting Forward with Scientific Socialism and rouse them from their desks and say The day has come, then, I am saying, you will have reached the first stage of a calamity.
Because your socialism is a rhetorical solution to real problems.
Now I’ll tell you why.
Thank god, I thought. I felt for him because up to now he had been having trouble getting the right level of discourse going. One problem was that he had too much to say. Also I could tell he liked the idea of proceeding by having enemies, manipulating people into goodnatured enmity toward him. I was on to him. Also showing through, I thought, was that he liked the people he was trying to jockey into antagonistic self-definitions. Also he was dealing with a very mixed group and was essentially uninterested in communicating with the most sophisticated members of it, for the obvious reason that their minds were already made up — yet he needed to retain their respect and was resorting to little tricks of allusion to show that he was only using some portion of what he knew or could say. It was the youth he was going for, but there were pitfalls in that. One danger was his seeming to talk down to them. Either because they were young or because they were Africans they had a less extended set of political referents to hang things on, or a different set, I should say. His speech pattern was adapting toward African English. Anybody who denies you talk more slowly and deliberately when you speak English to Africans is lying. The fact is that the English they learn in school is a very deliberately enunciated English, with the consonants stressed. You know this and yet you still feel like you’re condescending when you do it, and you sweat. A final thing he was struggling with that was apparent to me was the conviction that he had all the answers. He had thought these questions into the ground. This wasn’t manifesting as arrogance but as an unsuppressible certainty, which can be just as irritating. There is some degree of hindsight in all this analysis, I admit, but most of it came to me in bits at the time, even if it was reinforced when I discussed it with Nelson later.