A Way in the World

9. Home Again

THE FIRST black African country I went to was in East Africa. I was in my early thirties. I was loosely connected with the local university, and I lived in a little low bungalow in the landscaped grounds of a government compound on the edge of the town. Most of the people in the compound were expatriates — mostly British, with a few Americans — serving the government in various ways. Some were directly employed by the government; others had been sent out (like me) by foreign foundations or aid agencies.

The country was newly independent and was thought of as revolutionary, but the compound still had a colonial feel. It made me think of the expatriate compounds of the Trinidad oilfields, and it probably had been laid out at about the same time, between the wars.

The bungalows and flats in both places were quite modest. It was the setting — the many acres of landscaped grounds — that made them special, suggesting separateness and privilege. The land seemed to have been scraped clean of haphazard local bush. There were no internal fences, no middens that showed, no junk, no obvious patches of waste ground. The open spaces between houses were grassed. Every local tree and shrub, however common outside, cassia, coconut, flamboyant, hibiscus, seemed in this stripped enclosure to have an extra, exotic beauty.

The idea of privilege — or protection: almost the same thing — was not wrong. The East African compound was like a little welfare state within the country. There was a whole side of life we didn’t have to worry about. A special department looked after the flats and bungalows. It did repairs and replacements and attended to complaints. And though it wasn’t part of the official deal or issue, nearly everyone who came soon got a servant or houseboy who was used to the ways of the compound.

I was self-conscious with these servants in the beginning. I was embarrassed by the idea itself: African servants in East Africa — settler country in parts, still, and safari country as well — came with too many associations from books and films. But then I saw that most people on the compound, even the servants, were living unnatural lives. Everyone had been presented with a style — in some ways as formal as that of an Oxford college — that couldn’t exist outside. After a time the idea came to me that it might have always been like that on the compound, even in colonial days.

Because the compound was on the edge of the town and there were no buses or taxis, I had to have a car. And because I couldn’t drive, or didn’t trust myself with a car, I had to have a driver. It would have been convenient if one man could have done the driving for me and the cooking and the looking after the bungalow, but in the compound it didn’t work like that. I had to have a professional driver.

Just after breakfast the man would come, respectable and neat in creased trousers and clean shirt and shining shoes, and ask about the day’s programme. Most of the time I didn’t have a going-out programme. I was working in my bungalow. So he would sit in the kitchen and wait, at first looking up whenever I passed the open doorway, then conscientiously looking down. He took later to bringing comic books, magazines, and then proper books to the kitchen; he wrote letters. Sometimes in the morning I sent him home for the day, and then a few hours afterwards I wanted to get out. Compound life, with all its privileges, had its complications.

The servant and the driver had been found for me by Moses Lubero, who worked as a houseboy for a young English couple some houses away. Lubero was a heavy, slow man with bright, rolling eyes. I sometimes saw him with clothes-pegs in his mouth hanging out baby clothes. Baby clothes! Lubero was more important than that. He was said to control the houseboys on the compound. When he was out and about and he heard or saw my car coming he did a slow swivel of the neck and a very slow roll of his eyes to consider the car and me and the driver. It was as though there was something wrong with the muscles of his neck; but it might just have been his way of letting us know that he was keeping an eye on things.

He wore the standard houseboy whites: a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. From a distance they made him look like a fat boy. As you got nearer, his appearance changed: the fat boy wasn’t a boy at all. He was a middle-aged man who had seen much; there were deep lines from his cheekbones to the corners of his mouth, and frown lines on his forehead. The paunch — creasing the waistband of his white shorts — didn’t suggest softness. It suggested strength, authority, self-regard. Close to, he didn’t look friendly; he had an air of tribal authority. His surname indicated that he came from the centre of the continent; a grandfather or someone further back might have followed an Arab or Indian trader down to the coast and become beached there.

To control the houseboys on the compound was to have power. The jobs were better paid than comparable jobs in the town, and every bungalow or flat had well-maintained “quarters,” a servant room; many people in the town would have liked those quarters. There was also, with expatriates coming and going, a whole system of trade in the cast-off goods. The houseboys were controlled in other ways. It was Lubero who arranged everything when my own servant bought a broken-down old bicycle (borrowing through Lubero to do so, and also buying ill-fitting white-rimmed plastic shades to go with his new bicycle style).

THE COUNTRY was a tyranny. But in those days not many people minded. Africa had just begun to be independent, and the reputation of the president was that of a good man using his authority only to build socialism.

There was a section of the expatriates who saw themselves as serving this cause. It was one of the things that had attracted them to the country. They liked their closeness to power, and their simple but protected lives on the compound; though it worried them that they had to have the houseboys — they talked about that. Some of them even liked the idea of the shortages and austerity outside, and the disciplining of the people. They thought it was what had to come before things became better. They thought it right that people in the villages should be prevented from migrating to the capital. In this way the town didn’t grow, people were protected from the corruptions of town life, and it was easier for villages to be collectivized and returned to the socialism of traditional African ways. I think now that for these expatriates compound life would have provided something of what ashram life or the life of the religious commune provided for others elsewhere: liberation, new rigidities, a new self-awareness and self-cherishing.

Moses Lubero controlled the houseboys, and Richard kept an eye on the expatriates. Richard was English, a slender man in his thirties who used an ivory cigarette-holder. He invited people to dinner in his apartment when he felt they were straying. He worked for the planning department, but he was better known on the compound for the letters he wrote to foreign newspapers and magazines when they published critical things about the country and the president. He wrote not as an official but as a private person. He wrote of socialism as of an austere faith that was its own reward. He might say, “Why shouldn’t a poor African country be allowed to develop its own brand of socialism?” And he might say of the president: “He may not leave his country richer than he found it. But there isn’t only one way of measuring success, and this new man of Africa will have the satisfaction of having ruled according to his own high principles.”

Richard had an easy, self-mocking manner which made you feel that he was half on your side and that you could joke with him about what he had written. You couldn’t. He was humourless; he simply couldn’t take in a point of view that was different from his own.

One afternoon — I had sent the driver away for the day — I took the car out, to practise. I went on the airport road. It was the least busy of the roads around the capital. It went through no villages and it had a nice long straight stretch. On this stretch after some miles I saw a black-uniformed man on a motorcycle coming down towards me. And then I saw another uniformed man on a motorcycle. The men on the motorcycles were gesticulating. They appeared even to be half standing up on their bikes. When they came nearer I saw they were gesticulating at me. It became clear that they were furious with me, and it also became clear that they intended to drive me off the road. I pulled over on to the verge, without accident. Behind the motorcyclists was a big black car, and in the back seat were two men in off-the-shoulder African cloths. One of the men was the president. There was a smaller car behind, and behind that another motorcycle.

A few days later I saw Richard walking in his usual brisk way in the compound.

I said, “The other day the president drove me off the road.”

The fixed, meaningless smile left his face. He became severe. “You are making this up. You know you are making this up. The president doesn’t do that sort of thing.”

“That’s what I thought. But then I had never met him on the road before.”

“You can write what you want, of course. You have that freedom and you know it. The South African exiles here will certainly be grateful to you for your satire.”

He spoke satirically himself. The country offered ready asylum to political exiles from South Africa, and in the compound we had a number of them. They made a distinct, depressive element. A few of them were black; many more were white. The whites were unhappy, damaged people. They might have been damaged by defeat, or it might have been that exile had brought out the melancholy or incompleteness that had always been there in their natures, below their political cause. I had never known revolutionaries before, and I suppose I had theatrical ideas of what they would be like. These people on the compound — whom I saw from a distance, and whom I found hard to get to know — were not defiant or fierce or full of faith. They were more like people who had been dealt a bad hand, had taken a wrong turning, and who would somehow always be out of reach, always dealing with their private demons.

THE COUNTRY was full of a special hate. It was for the small Asian or Indian community who, as elsewhere in East Africa, were mainly traders and shopkeepers and made a closed group.

There would have been ancient connections between the coast and India. It was an East African pilot who showed Vasco da Gama the way to India. The Victorian explorer Speke even published a map, said to be based on old Hindu texts, giving Sanskrit names for the rivers, lakes and mountains of Uganda. There would have been an Indian element in the mixed Swahili culture of the coast But people didn’t carry this kind of history in their heads; and the Asian community that was hated was the more recent one that had come over and settled in the half century or so of British rule.

The hate was in the newspapers, in the parliament, in the compound, in the university. It was open; it was licensed; it brought about no retaliation. Expatriates dealt in it to show their own commitment to the country. Some political people saw it as part of the business of building socialism, and gave it a doctrinal gloss.

The Asian shops in the capital would have been drab enough with all the regulations about imports and foreign exchange. It didn’t take much to see that in the background there was a further constant plundering of the shopkeepers by officials, important men in the president’s party, blackmailers, and finance houses in England and elsewhere who were being used to get money out of the country. The shopkeepers, Hindu or Muslim, were stoical; this was the gift of both religions. They didn’t complain, and they wouldn’t have wanted to do so to outsiders. But the griefs of those shops, dark wooden or concrete boxes that attracted such hate, seemed a world away spiritually from the landscaped grounds of the compound and the even more splendid campus of the new university, which had been built with foreign aid and seemed to speak of foreign approval of what the president did.

It was well known that in his early political days the president had been helped financially by some people in the Asian community. The president himself sometimes mentioned this when he attended certain ceremonial Asian occasions. I met one of those helpers one day. He was in his sixties, heavy, ill-looking, his active life in the past. He came of a merchant family who had migrated to East Africa at the turn of the century. Unusually, he had not gone into the family business. He was a lawyer. Perhaps because of this Separation from family ways, and his isolation, he had been marked, more than most Indians I had met in India or East Africa, by the racial cruelty of pre-war East Africa. (It was the distorted echo of that cruelty that had in the beginning disturbed me even in the revolutionary compound, in the conventions about houseboys, their uniforms, their quarters.) It had been especially hard for him in the pre-war years, when he had felt himself caught between the humiliations of colonial East Africa and colonial India. After the independence of India he had devoted himself to the East African cause. He had got to know the president when the president was a schoolboy, and already famous, already spoken of as a leader. He had always admired the president; even now he admired him.

After he had talked of the excesses of the president’s rule — the cruelties in the villages, the harassment of the Asian community, the censorship of the press, the regimentation of the students in the university — the lawyer went back to talking of the qualities he had admired in the president. It was as though, in spite of everything he had said, he had reached a personal point of rest and reconciliation, and had a bright vision of the future. There were three or four British people like that on the compound, not old, and one or two with some family connection with Africa. They loved Africa for the landscape, the peoples, the mysteries of the religion, the animals, the spaces. They could live nowhere else, and they intended to stay, regardless of politics, as long as they were allowed.

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.

“SOON YOU’LL have no secrets,” Richard had said. He didn’t mean anything by that; he was just using words, to appear to be saying more than he had said. It was like his fixed smile, which wasn’t a smile at all. But this time he had drawn a little blood: he would have noticed that I was embarrassed by his news.

I hadn’t met Blair since 1950, and I didn’t want to meet him now. I didn’t like the politics he had gone into. The almost religious exaltation of the early days of the black movement had given way very quickly to the simplest kind of racial politics. In Trinidad that meant anti-Indian politics and constant anti-Indian agitation; it was how the vote of the African majority was to be secured. Though I was no longer living in Trinidad, I was affected. I found when I met people I had known there, even people I had gone to school with, that the racial question couldn’t be ignored. There was a self-consciousness on both sides, a new falsity. And I found, with every visit I made to Trinidad, that I was more and more cut off from the past.

The politics that supported Blair’s career were more than politics to me, and I didn’t like to think of him coming here, to this African country which thought of itself as revolutionary, to unsettle things further. I had got used to the unnatural-ness of compound life, with its semi-colonial formalities. The local Asian community, with a sense of clan and caste far stronger than anything we knew in Trinidad, never saw me as one of themselves, and I had found ways, as a man on my own, of detaching myself from the racial undercurrents of the place. I felt that with Blair here all that was going to change.

I couldn’t say that I had really got to know Blair in 1949. I was very young, seventeen. I never met him outside the office, and in the office he revealed little of himself. He was a big man but he moved quietly, without disturbance, as though he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. His handwriting was very small and neat; it spoke of confidence, method, ambition. He was formal and always controlled. His thoughts often seemed far away, and I thought this was because of the studies he was doing at home for the London external degree. He didn’t drink with the others on pay-day after the office doors had been closed. He didn’t hang around after work. He wheeled his bicycle out of the bicycle-rack, lifted it down the Red House steps, and was off.

He was considered an exemplary man and everyone in the office respected him. His correctness seemed to be part of his character, and the correctness was something he got from his background, which was special. He came from an all-African village community in the north-east of the island. For various reasons — remoteness, bad roads, the “witch-broom” blight that had destroyed cocoa estates, the Depression — the community had kept its separateness for some generations, and in the wreckage of the old estates they had developed a kind of gentle pastoral life. They were self-possessed and calm, without the scratchiness of black people elsewhere. They were famous for their honesty, their unlocked front doors, and they had good manners. They said “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” to strangers and expected to be greeted in the same way. They never spoke of a date to come without adding “please God”: “Next month, please God,” “Next Friday, please God.” They were slow, but they were thought of as good people and were liked for that reason.

Blair would have been one of the first of the community to be educated, and the strange thing was that he seemed to come perfectly equipped for a civil service career. I used to think, being just out of school myself, and considering Blair’s correctness in the office, that the manners and attitudes of Blair’s slow, pastoral community had given him the demeanour of a school prefect, a head boy: someone subordinate, but on the side of authority. He had joined the civil service in the colonial time; he would have been ready then (like some of the older clerks) for a life of subordination; and in those early years he would have been just as correct as he was when I knew him, a newly appointed senior clerk for whom the world was opening up. Buried or submerged below the man I knew in 1949, and the later politician whom I didn’t know, was this calmer man from another age who wanted only to make his peace with the world and was willing to settle for what he could get.

I don’t think Blair would have liked to be reminded of this earlier man. Though it would have been his instinctive feeling for authority, his acceptance of it and his sense of where it lay — together with his discovery of racial passion — that had pushed him into politics and kept him always close to power, while others came and went. His correctness didn’t leave him in his new career; he was trusted by his superiors and looked up to by others. The stories that were spread of his corruption (and might have been exaggerated) were of a piece with his past: he was the man who arranged things for more important people who wished to keep their noses clean.

RICHARD HAD appeared to say that he was going to ask me to a dinner he was arranging for Blair. No invitation came, and it was through Moses Lubero, the compound fixer, and my own servant Andrew that I learned about Blair’s arrival. The houseboy whom Lubero assigned to Blair came from Andrew’s tribe and was possibly a close kinsman of Andrew’s. He hadn’t worked in the compound before, and Lubero had to get a permit for him to leave his village and come to work in the town. The place was full of regulations like this, which meant that at every stage there were people who had to get a little money.

The new houseboy looked like Andrew, I thought, but was younger and smaller. He didn’t wear houseboy whites, like Lubero; he followed Andrew and wore flared blue jeans. The jeans he wore were a little too big for him (they might have been Andrew’s) and he had to have big turn-ups. For a week or so he spent much time with Andrew in the small bungalow kitchen (getting crowded, with the driver there as well) and I believe Andrew was teaching him how to cook and generally do things. One morning I saw the new man go to a hibiscus shrub outside the bungalow and very carefully cut and strip a little twig. Andrew would have sent him out to do that and was no doubt keeping an eye on him at that moment: at lunchtime I saw two sections of the very twig sharpened to a point and stuck on either side of a piece of boiled corn. So I knew that one day soon Blair would come back to his bungalow or apartment from his discussions in the Ministry of Finance or wherever and start his lunch with boiled corn with hibiscus handles.

At the end of the first month Andrew sold his bicycle to the new man, and Andrew (through Lubero, of course) bought another, better bicycle, which would have made him borrow a little more. So now the new man would come cycling up to my bungalow to be with Andrew. Sometimes he did so in the middle of the morning, and sometimes then Andrew would cycle away with him, no doubt to straighten out some disaster in Blair’s kitchen.

Houseboys were free in the afternoon, and for two or three weeks Andrew and his kinsman spent some of this free time cycling about together in the compound. It was a form of celebration. They were showing off their new bicycles and happiness and style. The new man began to wear Andrew’s white-rimmed plastic shades. They were small for him, too, and the arms sloped high above his ears. Andrew two or three days later began to wear new wrap-round shades; and then, stealing a further march on the new man (who could do nothing to catch up until pay-day), he took to wearing a tie on these afternoon rides.

They were doing it to be noticed, but when one afternoon I saw them cycling past, Andrew gave a smile, almost a laugh, which was at once an expression of pleasure and a way of saying that he knew the whole thing was quite ridiculous. Then immediately, for the benefit of his kinsman now, he tightened his mouth, looked ahead, and went serious again, and the two of them, very like one another, moved steadily away on the neat black-asphalted road with its whitewashed kerb, below the brilliant orange-and-yellow flowers of the tulip trees planted in colonial days, both of them pumping on the pedals in measured revolutions, the new man sitting on a saddle a little too high and straining to keep his feet on his pedals all the way down: celebrating their happiness and security and luck, Blair’s houseboy and mine, in the landscaped grounds of the compound which was like an echo of the oilfield compounds in Trinidad which both Blair and I had known only from the other side of the fence in 1949, when we were both at hopeful moments of our life, and when we felt that the world was beginning to change, though we could never then have seen the changes that were going to bring us here, to an African country that to us at the time was only a name.

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.”

I had often thought later — in England, when my writing career appeared not to be starting — of that joyous time of pretend-writing in the department. It took me six years to see what was wrong with that article about the beauty competition. The seventeen-year-old writer was too falsely knowing: his judgements, the angle of his observations, his jokes suggested he knew another, better world. That phantom world, which came with the first, innocent wish to be a writer, was hard to get rid of.

And it occurred to me now, considering Blair’s freer movements in De Groot’s verandah and a laugh bigger than I remembered, that at about the same time Blair might have come to the realization that the character he had been presenting to the world — the self-made man, still striving, looked up to by all, correct, with the manners of his special community — was in some essential way false to himself. He might have been granted another vision of his isolated community living in the debris of old estates; he might have taken their story back and back, to unmentionable times. And he might have decided then — like me as a writer — to remake himself.

We met at about half-past four. Blair left us at about six, when it was beginning to grow dark and cooking smoke from the chattering settlements below began to rise through the bush. We talked of meeting again. He mentioned dinner in his bungalow. (I thought of the burden on his houseboy, Andrew’s kinsman.)

There was no further meeting. He didn’t live. I was left only with those ninety minutes, and, as can happen after an unexpected or brutal event, ironies began to attach to every gesture and statement of Blair’s that came back to me. It is hard to believe on such occasions that a person doesn’t have, deep down, at some hidden level, an intimation that he has closed the circle and is near the end of things, and hard to believe that this knowledge doesn’t break through a person’s words and actions in a coded way.

And, in fact, at that last meeting Blair did speak, if not in code, in an oblique way of things that were important to him. Breaking into something De Groot was saying, he said, quite early on, spacing out the words, and with pointing gestures that made him seem enormous in the little verandah, “I know that the world I will be leaving is better than the one I came into.” That was a simple racial statement, easy to understand. It explained his passion, his politics; and it was true: the revolution he had taken part in had succeeded.

But then a little later he softened the aggression of those big gestures. We were talking of insurance companies and medical tests, and he told a story of going to get a test in a clinic in New York. After his details had been taken down, he was given a dressing gown and told to go to a cubicle and undress. The dressing gowns were in four colours. The colours had no significance and the gowns were given out at random, but when the gowned men gathered in a waiting room, dressing-gown colour groups tended to form. He might have begun this as a serious story, but when De Groot and I laughed at the absurd picture he was creating, he laughed too.

Much later on, when De Groot was talking of tribal politics in East Africa, Blair gave the conversation an unexpected turn. We were all tribalists and racialists, he said; we could all easily fall into that kind of behaviour, if we thought we could get away with it. He told another story. He was in New York, at a railway station, and standing in line to buy a ticket. (He had a United Nations posting and New York was the setting of many of his stories.) The couple at the head of the line were causing a delay. They were an Asian couple: Blair couldn’t say whether they were Filipinos or Malays or Indonesians or Chinese. They couldn’t speak English. It took a long time for the clerk to establish where they wanted to go; and it was only after the clerk had given the tickets that the man began to look for money to pay. Blair found himself saying, “What’s the matter with that damned Jap?” And the white man in front had turned and looked at Blair with great disregard.

It was a simple story; Blair and I had grown up surrounded by rougher racial manners and hearing much worse things about all races. But this was more than a story Blair was telling against himself. This was a story to tell us where he had got to; it was an offering to the two of us sitting with him in the fading light. Taken together with what he had said earlier in the afternoon, it was like a statement, made without excuse or apology, that after the passion of his politics he could now be another kind of man, ready for new relationships. De Groot, with his sensitivity in these matters, would have picked up something like that during his own meeting with Blair; and I found myself moved by what I thought Blair was saying. He expected his racial passion to be understood; he didn’t think he had to explain it. That was impressive; it made me think afresh of his lost community in the blighted cocoa woods. I also liked the generosity, and the clumsiness, of his last story. The statement he had made could have been made only obliquely or in code, and with that kind of clumsiness; that was moving in itself. All three of us might have found plain words difficult.

For the rest of the time De Groot talked about the Swahili culture of the coast. This would have pleased Blair, the idea of the antiquity of Africa, the idea of African history, though he would not have been able truly to share De Groot’s enthusiasms. He had got his certificates and external degrees, but he was not in any wider sense a well-read or educated man. He would have had no idea of the cultures De Groot was talking about, no feeling for the dates or periods.

But here too he wished to show himself in a new light. He played down whatever pleasure he might have felt at this talk of African history, and he said at a certain moment, “Sometimes here, when people start talking about gold and ivory, you can believe you’re living in Biblical times. You almost expect them to start talking of peacock feathers.”

This appeared to be a reference to the job he had come out to do for the government, and it appeared to confirm compound stories that Blair had run into trouble with some politicians. They had expected him only to put a squeeze on the Asian community. He was doing a lot more: he had begun to look at the smuggling out of ivory and gold. This was as much of a drain on the country’s resources as the dealings of the harassed businessmen in the capital. It was well known that this kind of smuggling was being done by important men in the party, who (because of the regulations controlling the movement of people, and the innumerable new laws) now ruled in the interior with all the authority of old-fashioned chiefs, and (in spite of the talk of the socialist restructuring of society) often were connected to the old chiefly families.

De Groot said, after Blair had left, “He should be careful. They are not all like the president. There are some very wild men out there, and they can be pretty crude. The new power has gone to their heads. They feel they can do anything.”

I got another version of the same message from Richard some days later. He stopped me in the compound and said, “I have been looking up your friend’s record. He’s not exactly Mr. Clean, is he?” I knew then that Blair had begun to tread on important toes, and that Richard was already revolving in his head his defence of the regime, polishing his phrases, against anything that Blair might make public.

IT WAS as brutal and messy as De Groot had suggested it might be. And so shocking — even to Richard — that for some days no announcement was made of Blair’s death; no one would have known how to present it. Instead, there were rumours, some of them inspired by people who would have wanted Blair out of the way. The first was that he was killed in a brothel just outside the capital. Another was that there had been some kind of Asian conspiracy. Yet another, coming very quickly afterwards, was that his bungalow on the compound had been burgled, his papers and everything else of value stolen, and his houseboy had vanished. There was some truth in the last part of the story. His houseboy, Andrew’s kinsman, wasn’t seen again.

What was established, after some days, was that Blair’s body had been found in a showpiece banana plantation many miles from the capital. This plantation had been created with foreign advice and money, and was intended to be a model for the collectivized farms of the future. It had a special atmosphere. Old banana leaves, quickly drying and breaking down, and many inches thick, were used as a mulch. To walk on this mulch was like walking on a very thick, soft carpet. It deadened footsteps and seemed to absorb all other sound, and you very quickly began to feel uncertain about your footing. The people who had brought Blair or his body here seem to have intended to bury him below the mulch, but then they had been disturbed or had changed their minds. It was a day or two before the body was found and taken to the capital, and many days after that — and after a short official announcement of the death — before the body was flown back to Trinidad.

In the version of his death I carried in my imagination I saw Blair alive in that banana plantation, a big man floundering about in silence in his big, shiny-soled leather shoes in the soft mulch, between his sure-footed attackers. There would have been a moment in that great silence when he would have known that he was being destroyed, that his attackers intended to go to the limit; and he would have known why. And I feel that if, as in some Edgar Allan Poe story, at the moment of death, while the brain still sparked, a question could have been lodged in that brain—“Does this betrayal mock your life?”—the answer immediately after death would have been “No! No! No!”

Andrew grieved for his kinsman but didn’t want to talk about him. He continued to drink on weekends. On Mondays he would be red-eyed, with a very bad headache, as before. But now, in addition, grief dulled his skin; his face was like a carving, without mobility, the lips seemingly clamped together, the lower lip jutting. For some weeks he appeared to be close to tears.

Moses Lubero didn’t do his slow swivel of neck and eyes to look at me as I drove past. He took care now to look away, to be busy with what he was doing. Six weeks or so later the bicycle that had belonged to Andrew’s kinsman (and had before that belonged to Andrew) began to be ridden about in the compound by a new houseboy.

And Richard. Two years ago I was in Paris for the publication of one of my books. In a restaurant one day, near the end of a lunch with an overworked French journalist who was bluffing his way through an interview, someone behind me said in my ear in English, “A voice from the remote past.” It was Richard, without cigarette and ivory cigarette-holder. Twenty-five years had given him a lot of hair in his nostrils and ears. He was wearing a grey suit and he said he was working in Paris for a foundation, arranging scholarships for students from eastern Europe. He had left Africa and had married again. “The male menopause,” he said, in his brisk, seemingly jovial way. “What they call the change of wife.” That was like Richard: the tested phrase. I said, “It must be grim for you, seeing what’s happened in so many parts of Africa.” He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I left Africa only because of what I told you. I wanted a change, and what I am doing now is much more valuable. Eastern Europe is much worse than anything in Africa. A place like Hungary had a perfectly good communist government. They gave that up, and now they are on the brink of ethnic conflict. Nobody says they are barbarians and savages.” That again was like Richard, still concerned only with the rightness of his principles, and somehow still safe.

I USED TO have a fanciful picture of the ceremonial return of Blair’s body to Trinidad: the aeroplane was at the airport, and the big casket was being shouldered down the steps by grave men in dark suits, four men or perhaps six. I knew the picture was fanciful, but its stateliness seemed correct for the occasion, until I began to question it. To take a casket of that size down the steps would have been impossible for four men or six men. Where would the casket have been in the aeroplane? It would have had to be battened down to the floor in some way. A number of seats would have had to be taken out; that would have meant that a plane had been chartered. That hadn’t happened, so that picture of the casket and the steps and the men in dark suits had to be set aside. The truth would have been simpler. The body would have been in a box, and it would have been placed in a refrigerated part of the aircraft’s hold. The body would have been embalmed in Africa; that meant the internal organs would have been removed. At the airport in Trinidad the flaps of the hold would have opened, and when the time came the box would have been transferred to a low trailer, and perhaps in some way hidden or covered. There would have been formalities. Would the embalmed body in its box then have been transferred to a hearse? The hearse didn’t seem right. I made enquiries. I was told that the box would have been taken away in an ambulance to Port of Spain, and then the shell of the man would have been laid out in Parry’s chapel of rest.

December 1991–October 1993