A Shade of Difference (13 page)

In fact, he told himself now with irony that was not quite irony and sarcasm not entirely sarcastic as he readied his concluding words of appeal to the nations sitting silently before him, there would always be in Gorotoland some little piece of blackness that would be forever England; and whether he or the English would ever understand the curious love-hate of it, either in Gorotoland or in so many other places in Asia and Africa where their stuffy, proud, and strangely gallant cavalcade had passed, he very much doubted.

This, however, was a mature thought now, long after that first unforgettable passage up the Solent into Southampton Water; the ride into London on the tootling train through the tidy little fields, green with a greenness even the highlands of Gorotoland could not match; and his first excited introduction to the strange ways and strange world of the white man. The junior clerk from the Colonial Office who shepherded him from dockside to the capital was one who took his duties seriously and was also gifted with the ability to address children as adults without being patronizing about it. Long before the train pulled into Waterloo Station he had broken through the awed reserve of his royal charge and Terry was asking questions so fast his mentor found it difficult to keep up. (To this day the M’Bulu still received an occasional letter, increasingly wistful and concerned, from his old friend. Recently he had stopped replying.) By the time he was taken off to Eton a week later, he had been given a quick but thorough introduction to the major relics of the English past and in some subtle, understated way been given to feel that he was fortunate indeed to have the opportunity to add its heritage to his own. He was not, at first, prepared to accept this without a struggle, until somewhere early in his public-school career, when he suddenly perceived the basic element in the heritage: a willingness to accord to one’s opponent a decency and fairness as great as one’s own. Then he began to see how vulnerable this made his hosts, and after that he had the key to his future and that of Gorotoland firmly in his grasp. A boy who had the purposeful determination to murder his brother at the age of thirteen did not need a great deal of assistance from outsiders in getting where he wanted to go; but the English, just by being English, gave him all they could.

Academically, his record was brilliant from the first, and by the time he was ready to enter Oxford the judgment of the Resident had been more than justified. At Magdalen the story continued, and, accompanying it, with a sort of offhand air that greatly impressed his schoolmates, the steady development of that reputation that soon earned him the sobriquet “Terrible Terry.” There was not much that Terence Ajkaje, heir of Gorotoland and veteran of puberty rites, did not know about sex, in all the infinite varieties that fascinated the students of Oxford as they fascinate students everywhere. Being big, handsome, and black gave him an added advantage, and in very short order he was welcomed in many circles, some rather peculiar and all quite influential, both at the University and in London. A secret contempt, which did not need much encouragement to get started, began to fill his mind for the self-righteous, tightly controlled whites who preached such lofty morals and, at least in his experience, did such avid and hungry things when you took off your clothes for them.

Inevitably he soon became the darling of the sensational press. “African Prince Cited,” the London
Times
would murmur discreetly; “TERRIBLE TERRY BOPS COPS, JUGGED AGAIN,” the
Express
would roar. A series of escapades and a growing string of well-publicized dates with titled young ladies made him the pet of the columnists and the darling of the gossips. The final accolade came just before he left England, in a valedictory personality sketch in the
Daily Mail:
“TERRY JOINS ‘SET’: PRINCESS FINDS HIM AMUSING.”

Behind the window dressing, most of it both socially enjoyable and physically refreshing, a mind like a razor busily stowed away all the information it received, both textual and human, at Oxford and during a year’s postgraduate study at the London School of Economics. It also, on a few quieter, unpublicized trips upcountry with his old mentor from the Colonial Office, gave him as much insight as a foreigner could ever achieve into the enigma of Britain: a tiny country, filled with a thousand surprises, each a thousand years old, that never quite divulged its innermost realities to anyone who wasn’t native. As a tribalist, he eventually concluded with some ironic amusement that he was in the presence of another tribe, and one he would never completely understand: very ancient, going back very far into the past, surrounded by haunted scenes and haunted memories and heroes and heroines and deep-dyed villains who had never really died. “But all these people are still alive!” he had finally exclaimed in amused amazement to his mentor as they studied some ruined haunt of Hotspur in the west; and so it seemed, in this lovely little land where, eating lunch in some ancient inn set in an emerald valley in the hills, one might almost expect to hear in the courtyard a rattle and a clatter and a whicker and a whinny and, looking out, see Great Elizabeth, all silks and jewels and spangled things, descending from her coach; and, being startled but not at all surprised, say politely, “Why, yes, ma’am. But I had thought you were in London.”

So England left her mark, for all that he had sampled some of her most superficial as well as most impressive aspects, and for all that he headed home to Gorotoland determined to put to use all his British-conferred knowledge to break his ties with Britain just as rapidly as he could. In Molobangwe he found his father, now in his early seventies, failing badly; but although he and his mother had one more talk concerning the possibilities of again seeking the aid of the gods and ancestors to hasten his accession to the throne, they decided that it would be neither necessary nor wise. Independence was sweeping Africa now, and the world was suddenly acutely conscious of everything that went on there; it would not suit his purposes to have “Fresh Heir” taken out of the files and brought up to date. He decided instead, after securing by blood-oath the acquiescence of the Council of Elders in the unheard-of proposition that his mother should serve as Regent during his father’s decline, to go off to the United States and take another postgraduate year, this time at Harvard. Before he left, he married three wives and spent an intensive two weeks alternating among them night and day in the firm determination to leave behind as many heirs as possible. He was pleased to learn a month after he left that all were pregnant.

In the United States he went about as determined to absorb impressions and knowledge as he had been in Britain. He arrived with his reputation fairly well established, and while he had decided that it would be best to play down the “Terrible Terry” side of it, at least in public (in private, he found himself as eagerly pursued in Harvard Yard and along the gaudier reaches of the eastern seaboard as he had ever been in Oxford and London), he put the rest of it to good use.

Great racial ferment was under way in America, too, which was one reason he had wanted to go there, and he promptly found himself in great demand from many groups in both races as a speaker and adviser on African affairs.

“While his own country is still struggling to achieve the full forms of democracy,”
The Reporter
announced in an admiring article, “the basic freedoms and liberties of its citizens are being daily strengthened with new guarantees.”

This was news to Terry, but he said, “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” with complacent quickness and a brisk confirming nod when he was asked about it on
Face the Nation
. Self-delusion, he rapidly found, was the principal characteristic of mid-century America, and this made the country willing sucker bait for anyone who could offer a reasonable facsimile of idealism and goodwill. The word was enough, provided it was applied to humanitarian causes, and nobody bothered to check behind the word for either facts or ultimate intentions. It never occurred to him to appreciate the genuine goodwill toward man from which this sometimes terrifying naïveté arose, since in his country, as in so many others, disinterested goodwill toward man was a concept that simply did not exist. He concluded soon that many Americans were fools in this regard, and one night when he had been invited to be one of the principal speakers at a Brotherhood Week banquet in New York he decided to put it to the test.

“It has been wonderful to have this fine roast beef,” he began, looking out upon the glittering audience agleam with diamonds and humanitarian impulse. “In my country, you know, we eat
people.
This is quite a change.”

They had roared with happy laughter and considered him the most charming spoofer. After that he adopted a sort of sardonic double-talk with his American hosts, which they always took with absolute seriousness. The British, he decided, always believed that you were
going
to tell them the truth, and eventually caught up with you if you lied; the Americans always believed that you
were
telling them the truth, and never caught up with you if you lied. He still found this puzzling, at times, but it did not stop him from using the fact with the most calculating ruthlessness to advance his personal and national ambitions.

In contrast to what he found in America, the harsh dynamism of Soviet Russia and the steady hammering advance of Communism upon the citadels of the West had deeply impressed him. He had deliberately refrained from giving himself the experience of studying in Moscow, even though the Soviet Government had secretly invited him on several occasions; his business was with the West and he did not wish to alienate it unduly. Possibly if he had gone there he would have been less impressed and less willing to be gullible about it. But to him, as an African watching the world convulsion go forward after the Second World War, seeing the confused and ineffectual way the West attempted to withstand it, perceiving in it all the opportunities it held for the clever little mice to play while the great cats were at one another’s throats, he inevitably came to admire and respect the Soviet approach. It was as cruel, as brutal, as heartless, and as cold-blooded as his own. The words were roseate, the principles were noble, the slogans were as ringing as any to be found in the West; but, underneath, the un-deviating purpose and aim was as deceitful, as deceptive, as devious and unprincipled and greedy for power as anything to be found in Africa. The Communists talked as volubly as the West of shining goals; but the Communists acted, too, and the talk turned out to be a lie: and the lie worked. No one with a background such as Terry’s could fail to be impressed by that.

It was no wonder that since his father’s deep senility he had permitted the secret entry of Soviet and Chinese Communist advisers and technicians into Gorotoland, that Communist arms were being secretly assembled in the highlands, and that in the past two years he had come increasingly to rely upon his younger cousin (making sure, of course, that the cousin was always attended by tribesmen absolutely loyal to himself), who had accepted Moscow’s invitation and had spent three years in Russia.

At Harvard, where he audited a number of classes and participated in a number of forums and other intellectual exercises concerning emergent Africa, he found himself looked to as an authority both on what should be done there and in the United States as well. There were several incidents involving colored students (one was a star trackman named Cullee Hamilton), and during each he was interviewed, questioned, and quoted. He made his statements suitably fervent and solemn, and was given much attention as a youthful symbol of the wave of independence and dawning justice that was racing across Africa and finding many echoes at the lunch counters and campuses of America.

And this reputation, he thought contemptuously now, he still retained as he launched upon his final comments to the First Committee, despite the fact that Gorotoland had a tribal caste system as terrible as India’s, despite the fact that his government still connived at secret slavery, despite the hushed-up massacre of the United Opposition Party two years ago and the ritual sacrifices that still went on in the cave at Mbuele. The British were beginning to catch onto him, but in the United States he still remained the shining knight jousting with the forces of colonialist evil. Occasionally some disturbing question would be raised by someone, some embarrassing disclosure would creep into the pages of the papers; he could always count upon a dozen influential defenders to spring to his side, pooh-pooh it all away, write indignant editorials denouncing the suspicious, or offer the world some other equally impressive example of hardheaded realism on the subject. There were a great many people in academic, literary, and journalistic circles of the United States, he had been happily surprised to learn, who simply
did not want
to admit the seamy side of their chosen idols: too much of their own reputations was involved. Having committed themselves to certain people and causes, they could not abandon the commitment without admitting that they had been fools. And none of them, if it could possibly be avoided by sufficiently loud, sarcastic, indignant, and self-defensive noise, would do that.

So, while he knew Claude Maudulayne and Orrin Knox and Vasily Tashikov and a good deal of the rest of the world assessed him for exactly what he was, he was calmly confident—as he rolled out his concluding sentences about “help us achieve true liberty for Gorotoland—help us join the nations of mankind, upright and unafraid”—that he could count on much friendly support in America. It gave an extra power to his peroration as it resounded now in First Committee just prior to the vote on the resolution offered by Felix Labaiya-Sofra in the name of Panama:

“Oh, Mr. Chairman”—he told himself, with a sudden reversion to the happy excitement that made his heart feel like bursting, how beautifully he was performing, here at the UN—“we cry out in Gorotoland! The world cries with us! Freedom for my poor oppressed people. Freedom—
now!”
And once again he crashed his enormous fist down on the rostrum while the Communist bloc banged and pounded and applause rippled over floor and public galleries. And once more he found Lord Maudulayne raising his hand and, with an ironic little bow, started to step aside. But the British Ambassador halted him with a gesture.