A Shade of Difference (12 page)

By a brisk policy of beheading his enemies and impregnating their wives, he managed in ten years, time to pacify Gorotoland and turn its people once again to the problem of eking out a living in the highlands, where some of them hunted, and on the plains, where the remainder grazed their cattle. He must in his way, as his descendant the 137th M’Bulu sometimes thought with real respect, have been something of a statesman, for he was able to work out a trading relationship between the hunters and the grazers that permitted them to live together in peace instead of existing forever at each other’s throats, as was so often the case elsewhere in Africa. He also chose for his seat of government the town of Mbuele in the highlands, thus adding to his title for all time the name of its first capital. It was only several hundred years later that the capital came down to Molobangwe on the plains as the result of a marriage between the two leading families in the nation; a choice that Terrible Terry deplored but which he could not change even in the mid-twentieth century, so rigid were the iron rules of tribal custom that still bound the ruler of Gorotoland to this day.

The centuries passed and other M’Bulus succeeded the pacifier of mountain and plain; in Europe and Asia civilization advanced across the hemispheres, great states rose and fell, wars and revolutions and dynastic enterprises swept the earth, men drew maps and navigated the globe, developed science and theology and medicine, began to think, first in idle dreams and then with mounting excitement, beyond the planet to the stars. In Gorotoland, as in the rest of Black Africa, life never changed from one century to the next. Men were born, lived, and died in accordance with ancient ritual. Tradition, superstition, terror, and ignorance ruled the life of the people. Around succeeding M’Bulus and the elder priests who presently came to form their council of state there encrusted an inflexible way of doing things that raised men barely above the beasts they hunted and the beasts they grazed and kept them there, apparently forever.

So ages passed to the middle of what was known, in distant regions out of sight and out of mind, as the nineteenth century.

And then suddenly the white man was everywhere in Africa, adventuring after gold, after diamonds, sometimes, encouraged by willing rulers such as the present M’Bulu’s grandfather, after slaves; pushing up river valleys, landing along the endless coasts, trading, colonizing, bringing an impatient, pushing, ambitious, violent, explosive, restless, never-fulfilled and never-satisfied civilization to all but the most inaccessible parts of the black continent. Some sentimentalists found it fashionable now to bemoan this invasion, alternating between ruthlessness and paternalism, and to deplore the passing of the noble savagery which had prevailed before. Terrible Terry was not among them. If it hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t be here now addressing the First Committee of this wobbly parliament of man; nor would he be able to command the attention of NBC, ABC, CBS,
Time, Life,
or the
New York
Times.
Savage innocence? They could have it! He would take “Meet the Press” any day.

For Gorotoland, the transition to British rule was sanguine and abrupt. A small exploratory expedition sent out by the Royal Geographic Society came innocently one day to Molobangwe in the sun. Fifteen savage minutes later its members were mercifully beyond sensation as a surprised and indignant reception committee readied them for lunch. The response of the Crown was inevitable and immediate. Two weeks later a full-scale military expedition appeared on the horizon, and by sundown a thousand of the M’Bulu’s finest warriors were dead, seven members of his Council of Elders were hanging from nearby thorn trees, and he and twenty-nine of his wives were in abject and ignominious captivity. Life was simpler in those days when there was no First Committee to appeal to, and the whole thing was decided with a dispatch no longer permitted in seeking solutions to the world’s more irritating problems. Disraeli turned up one morning at Windsor with good news for the Queen and, graciously if a trifle vaguely, she accepted one more jewel in her diadem and Gorotoland joined that long list of rather inadvertent and absent-minded conquests which turned the map crimson and, for a time now gone forever, gave the sun something to shine upon wherever it went.

There ensued a period of uneasy dominion which inculcated deep in the Goroto people and their ruler those traits of dissembling, deviousness, and deceit which were, though few who watched him at the rostrum now were aware of it, so much a part of the 137th M’Bulu. It went against the grain to give up slavery, ritual sacrifices, and the privilege of devouring one’s opponents; and back in the highlands, none of these pleasant customs ever died, despite the earnest efforts of the sweating, sandy-haired, red-faced, mustachioed, exasperated but terribly, terribly self-controlled young men who came out from London to do their best for the Empire and, quite sincerely, for the natives. The natives never really did desire all this well-meant attention, having been much happier in a state of self-ruled slaughter and their own precarious trade balance between hill and plain.

Toward the end something approaching a grudging tolerance for the colonizers finally became general in Gorotoland—they tried so hard, and were so inexplicably just, and it was so easy to pull the wool over their eyes and go right on doing what one had always done—but there was never at any time any real affection or loyalty. Not even when, with the country’s population pushing toward two million, thanks to white man’s administration, white man’s medicine, and white man’s peace, the British instituted a modest but definite program of sending a few of the brighter youths away to be educated in the white man’s world. This was regarded as one more example of an innate and baffling foolishness on their part, but it did not take long for the ruling family and the Council of Elders to perceive that this was a good thing and they had better allow a certain number to get in on it. This number, a fact known to Terry but unknown to Lord Maudulayne when they had argued the matter earlier that morning, was decided by the natives themselves. Education was restricted to those selected by the then M’Bulu and his immediate advisers and it was, they thought then, in their best interest to extend it to no more than a handful. Later, when independence swept Africa and the M’Bulu’s grandson was hurtled on the tide of it into his demand for immediate freedom, the grandson could have wished it had been more broadly based to provide him with a greater corps of potential administrators. But by then, of course, it was too late.

For himself, however, Terence (a tribute to the Resident, who professed to be pleased) Wolowo Ajkaje could not complain, once he had surmounted the apparently insurmountable obstacle of being born to the seventh wife of his late father. Ahead of him in the succession were four half brothers, and for thirteen of his years in the dusty royal compounds of Molobangwe it seemed likely that he would never be anything more than a very secondary brother of whoever succeeded to the throne, providing that worthy allowed him and the other brothers to live at all once he came to power. Indeed, there was considerable danger that some such sudden termination of his career might occur even before his father passed from the picture, so violent were the interfamily feuds that surrounded the succession. But the genius of his more notable ancestors, having skipped his father and several preceding M’Bulus, seemed to have lodged in Terry, and with a shrewdness beyond his years he dissembled his brains, hid his clever and overactive intelligence, and went about with an air of stumbling stupidity that provoked loud cries of indignation, but nothing worse, from his father’s other wives.

To his mother, whom he only wished he could have brought along to see him at the United Nations, and would have had she not been Regent and also badly crippled with arthritis, the M’Bulu felt that he owed most of his native abilities. He had never forgotten a wild night in his sixth year when a thunderstorm had seemed to come up from all of Africa below them to the south. Without a word his mother had taken him firmly by the hand and slipped away from the compound to a great bare baobab tree that stood on a little rise looking toward the mountains. There, with a sort of wild crooning chant whose echoes in memory could still make him shiver, she had implored the assistance of their ancestors and all the tribal gods for one, single, all-consuming purpose: “Make my son M’Bulu! Make my son M’Bulu! Make—my—son—M’Bulu!” At the height of the storm the ancestors and gods had reached down and, in a blinding flash of light, hurled them both insensate to the ground. “Damn-fool woman is lucky the lightning didn’t kill them both,” the Resident had grumbled hopelessly the next morning when they were still resting from the shock in the little makeshift hospital in Molobangwe; but neither he nor his mother ever doubted that they had been given a pledge of divine assistance for her ambitions, which thereafter became his own.

It took six years for the gods and ancestors to contrive the means to do it in the crowded compounds, but suddenly one day after his mother had passed silently outside a window overlooking a fireplace where a broth was being prepared for his two oldest half brothers, the gods and ancestors began to make good on their pledge. Within two hours his half brothers were rolling in agony in the dust, and a couple of hours after that his father had two less heirs. Inevitably this stirred sharp suspicions in Gorotoland, but the gods and ancestors had been as good as their bond: his mother had not been seen, and her protestations of innocence were so loud and aggrieved that everyone soon believed her and turned instead upon one of the Council of Elders, who presently vanished somewhere in the highlands and was heard from no more, despite the Resident’s earnest attempts for six months to find him.

A short time after that, the gods and ancestors intervened again, apparently on this occasion entirely on their own volition. The younger of his two remaining half brothers contracted a genuine case of pneumonia in the midst of the rainy season and was carried off in three days. That left one, a boy of fourteen, one year older than himself, son of his father’s fifth wife; and now, it seemed to Terry, it was time for the gods and ancestors to again take an active hand in his destiny.

It took him several months to decide how to help them go about it, but the approach of the annual puberty rites, held in a great cave in the highlands near the ancient capital of Mbuele, gave him the idea. The year before, in preparation for their own participation later, he and his brother had been permitted to watch in wide-eyed excitement from the outer reaches of the cave as the ceremony, in which the older men of the tribe were mingled with the novitiate youths, reached its peak. There came a moment when, elders and young stark naked and inflamed with fermented banana beer, standing in a great circle in the dimly lit cave, the ceremony reached a climax and everyone became so busy that no normal male could concentrate on anything but the sensations of his own body. Terry was normal enough in that, but he was abnormal in his powers of concentration and will. That moment, it seemed to him, would be the ideal moment for the gods and ancestors to insert a knife between the ribs of his half-conscious, half-blind, all-animal brother.

And so, as events went forward, it came about. With great presence of mind he concealed the knife beforehand; pretended to drink but refrained from it; and when the final moment came, did what the gods and ancestors intended him to do and then eased his dying brother gently down upon a nearby rock, unnoticed in the general grunting frenzy all around. Instead of fleeing the cave, he simply moved to another part of it, until he was on the other side of the fiercely quaking circle. And when, some hours later, the first spent novitiate staggered awake and tripped across the cold body of his brother, it was by then much too late for anyone to discover how the gods and ancestors had performed so foul a deed. (Far away in America,
Tune
magazine took its first notice of Terrible Terry in an account of the strange series of royal fatalities in Gorotoland, entitled “A Little Fresh Heir.” But of course no one in Gorotoland ever saw it, and it was soon forgotten by the rest of the world, for although it was an example of shrewd speculation, the facts to support it could not be proved.)

Thus at thirteen Terence Ajkaje became the heir apparent to Gorotoland, and a fortunate absence of any but female children in the huts of his father’s remaining five wives made it unnecessary for him and his mother to seek any more divine assistance. They could now proceed to prepare him, with the rather dazed concurrence of his father, who could not understand why the gods and ancestors had bereft him of so many heirs, for the throne. In the boy and his mother the British found both the material and the appreciation for what they were trying to do in education. There was no doubt, the Resident reported to London, that the heir to Gorotoland was as bright as a whip, or possibly three or four whips. He recommended every encouragement, and that was what the Colonial Office, in its ponderous but eventually efficient fashion, set out to provide.

Recalling now the stages of his education as he stared blandly down upon Lord Maudulayne and the rest in First Committee, the M’Bulu of Mbuele could not escape a small ironic bow in the confines of his mind to those who had opened the doors of the world for him. You did it well, you British, he said in a silent conversation that Claude Maudulayne could not hear but would not have been surprised about if he had; oh, yes, you did it well. More fools you, but—you did it well.

First had come shoes and European clothing, and an awkward period of practicing with them that lasted until time to leave for the trip to Mombasa and the slow steamer up the east coast, through Suez into the Mediterranean, and so past the soft green shores of fertile France to the misty little island that now, in the aftermath of her second great war, was saying good-by with increasing speed to all the lands on so many continents and across so many seas over which she had for so long held dominion. The British were a revelation to Terry, as they are to most who visit them at home; and in some strange way he both resented and admired, could not understand and yet could not ever entirely escape, they had left their mark upon him forever, no matter who the savage that lurked beneath.