The idea of putting up this edifice, called State House, was Nkrumah’s. The architects drew up plans — aimed at creating a building that would combine the height of monumentality with blinding modernity and maximum security. They realized their intentions. State House is gigantic. It stands twelve storeys high. Its annexes contain an enormous meeting hall and an enormous reception hall, and the main building is divided into sixty suites. Each chief of state and each foreign minister has one suite, and each suite consists of ten rooms, with two bathrooms, foyer, etc. The suites are furnished in the most refined splendour.
Even more striking is the security system. Once inside, you find yourself protected by a wall wherever you go, wherever you stand. It is laid out on the model of the toy called the ‘Russian grandmother’. In the biggest grandmother there nests a smaller one, and inside the smaller one an even smaller one, and so on. This is the same. Behind the first wall there is a second wall, and behind the second wall a third wall, and in the middle is the suite. In this way, the leaders are protected against attack. Hand weapons would do nothing. A bullet would ricochet off the walls, as would light and medium artillery and mortars up to 160mm. Nothing less than naval artillery or mass aerial bombing could make a dent in the fortress of State House. But such an eventuality was also provided for. Below State House are massive underground shelters with passageways connecting to the rest of the building. The shelters have electricity, lighting, running water, ventilation, etc. Here the leaders are safe even from bombs.
Unless somebody dropped an A-bomb.
In recognition of the fact that sieges can drag on, sufficient food supplies are furnished so that the leaders could not be starved out. In the right wing of State House there is an enormous refrigerated chamber in which enough food to last several months can be stored. Supplies of medicine, water and drinks are also stockpiled. State House has two independent energy sources (a power station and its own generators), as well as independent telephone cables connecting it to important world capitals.
One hardly need add that State House has its own pool, its own cafés, bars and restaurants, its own printing press, central air conditioning, a post office and television. A system has also been devised to protect it against an attack from within, in case of some fifth column uprising, and, in anticipation of this the corridors are neither straight nor interconnected, but winding, broken up, ellipsoidal, descending, zigzag, semi-circular, curved. In this way no attacker could ever take in a whole floor in his sights because a victim would need only to jump around the corner to be safe.
For security reasons it is forbidden to photograph State House, either close-up or from a distance and, if you did, the police would lock you up. Nor is it permitted to stop in front of State House and look at it for long: your papers would be checked and you would be chased away.
STATE VISIT. In 1862, during his expedition in search of the source of the Nile, Speke reached Uganda, where he visited the Baganda king, Mutesa. Alan Moorehead writes:
Speke set up his chair in front of the throne, erected his umbrella and awaited events. Nothing happened. For an hour the two men sat gazing at one another …
At length a man approached with a message: had he seen the King?
‘Yes,’ Speke answered, ‘for full one hour.’
When this was translated to Mutesa he rose and walked away into the interior of his palace.’
LIFE. The dictatorship of General Abbuda in the Sudan lasted six years. His regime fell on 21 October 1964. It was a harsh but superficial regime, with no mass support. Someone I met in Khartoum told me what happened after 21 October:
It was an extraordinary spectacle. Within three days Khartoum looked exactly the way it had looked the week before Abbuda took power, the way it had looked in 1958. All the old political parties reappeared immediately. Exactly the same parties, under the same names, with the same people. The same newspapers as before began to appear, with the same titles, the same typefaces and editorial stances. The janitors returned and started cleaning the parliament buildings on their own. The politicians immediately resumed the quarrels that had been broken off six years earlier in mid-sentence. Everything looked as if those six years of Abbuda’s government had never occurred. Those six years were only an interruption of something that is still continuing, whose thread has been picked up again and is being woven anew.
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Yet I have not written a dictionary or a book because whenever I start, taking a deep breath and crossing myself as if getting ready to jump into deep water, a red light starts blinking on the map — the signal that at some point on this overcrowded, restless, and quarrelsome globe, something is again happening, the earth quivering, staggering, because this relentless current, this stream of events — it is so difficult to step out of it on to a calm shore — keeps rushing and hurtling by, pulling me under.
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The editor-in-chief of Kultura, Dominik Horodynski, telephones to say that there is money and I can go to the Middle East (the Arab-Israeli war is on; it is late 1973). A few months later the Turks occupy half of Cyprus, on which island a worthy person will smuggle me in his car from the Greek to the Turkish side. I am returning from Cyprus when Janusz Roszkowski, the head of the Polish Press Agency, tells me that it is the last moment to try to get to Angola. I have to hurry before Luanda becomes a closed city. It will be five minutes to twelve when the Portuguese air force lifts me out of Lisbon on board a military transport.
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Pack the suitcase. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: typewriter (Hermes Baby), passport (SA 323273), ticket, airport, stairs, airplane, fasten seat-belt, take off, unfasten seat-belt, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, fasten seat-belt, descent, circling, landing, earth, unfasten seat-belts, stairs, airport, immunization book, visa, customs, taxi, streets, houses, people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness, loneliness, waiting, fatigue, life.
BOOTS
I met him in Damascus, in the elevator of a small hotel. He is a Palestinian, but he looks as if he has come straight from Siberia. Felt boots, a heavy coat tied with a belt, a fur cap with ear-flaps. Fortunately, the evenings are chilly in Damascus and you can walk around in a thick quilted jacket without roasting inside it. During the elevator ride, he reaches into his bag and hands me an apple. The Palestinian way of making acquaintances: offer fruit to the person you’ve just met. Fruit is the largest, and in fact the only, natural wealth of Palestine, and to give someone fruit is to give him everything you have.
He invites me to his room. He is the commander of one of the fedayeen groups that are fighting on Mount Hermon. It would be out of place to ask for his name or any details connected with his identity. He is from Galilee, let that suffice.
They have to dress warmly on the front, in down coats and ear-flaps, because Hermon is a mountain the same height as Mount Olympus, covered in snow and raked by icy winds. People die of exposure at night. And sometimes, when the shelling is heavy during the day, they lie motionless for hours and freeze to the rock. Unfortunately, they cannot get used to the snow or the cold; they might as well be fighting on an alien planet. The mountain keeps changing hands. Whoever takes the summit plants his flag there. Then another battle takes place, and, usually, a change of flags. Whoever dies, stays on the mountain, but it is worst for the wounded: there is no way to carry them down and they suffer a lot, because cold magnifies pain.