A Writer's World (23 page)

As Florence was to the old Grand Tour, so Alice Springs stands in any Australian itinerary: an apogee, where all that the journey represents is, in theory anyway, consummated at last. The Alice, as they call it in the Outback, must be one of the most famous little towns on earth, and though its origins are strictly functional, conceived as it was as a station on the transcontinental telegraph line, today one treats it as a sort of symbol or slogan, the home of the Flying Doctors, of the aboriginal painters and the Afghan camel-drivers, where the stock-trails converge upon the railhead and the Bitumen strikes out for Darwin and the Timor Sea.

If you have only a day in The Alice you can still extract a proper essence of Australiana, a happy whiff of that dusty, tangy, seat-and-leather flavour that informs the whole Australian myth, and still hangs evocatively around the bush. Contemporary Australia is essentially an urban country, rather flabby in spirit; but up at The Alice, where the wilderness lurches in vast barren formations towards an illimitable horizon – here the legend comes alive again.

You should start very early, when the desert nip is in the air, by walking out to the northern limit of the town, where the sealed road begins. There, if you are lucky, you will see one of the great sights of central Australia, a road train. With a blast of its vast diesel, a rumble of its twenty wheels, a blast of its klaxon and an air of tremendous swank, it will roar past you out of town like a vision of the frontier: fifty yards of cattle-truck, four trailers and a mighty tractor, the biggest thing on any road in the world, and a
phenomenon authentically Australian. High in his cab the driver grins at you through the dust swirls, and away he thunders towards the north, headed for the immense stock farms of the interior, where they sometimes number their cattle in hundreds of thousands, and where one property is slightly larger than Belgium.

His is the new Australia, but on the other side of town you may still chance upon the old-school overlanders. Even today the drovers still bring their huge herds week by week across the wasteland to The Alice, and here you can see them at the end of their trail, their fine lean horses tethered beside the track and their breakfasts simmering in the pot. These are Australians as you have always imagined them. I do not believe stronger or more likeable men walk the earth today, so calm and imperturbable are their manners, so infectious their kindly humour, so gauntly handsome their physiques. They are tired and dirty by the time they reach Alice Springs, prickly of stubble and grimy of fingernail, but they rest there like princes among their beasts, people of an enviable fulfilment, Australians to the manner born. But soon you must hurry to the airfield, for there a little aircraft is waiting to fly you to Ayers Rock, like a tourist bus hooting at you impatiently outside the Duomo. In a moment or two you are over the hills, and below you extends the eerie red world of the Australian Centre. It is the most fearful of landscapes, more terrible by far than Sahara or Empty Quarter, painted a queer cruel red and so corrugated by grotesque erosions that it often looks like some ominous belt of fortifications, where no man or animal is permitted to survive.

Strangest of all its strange shapes is the Rock itself, in whose bald shadow you presently alight. It is the biggest of all rocks, the most overbearing of monoliths, standing vast and all alone in a flatland and constantly changing colour with the shifting light – now blue, now pink, now almost crimson in the sunset. Its humped flank is smooth and slippery, and as you scramble up its gullies the wilderness seems to grow around you, ever wider, ever emptier, until at last, when you reach the cairn and the lonely tree upon its summit, with the wind whistling around your ears and the rock pools ruffled at your feet, you feel that you are poised upon an absolute pinnacle of isolation – wreathed in native legend and sorcery, removed from the plane of the ordinary, encamped in some upper attic of the never-never.

For you are in aboriginal territory here. This is one of the reserves of the Northern Territory, and when you have clambered down the Rock again you may visit an encampment of the black people. They are living in tattered jumbled tents, with high-spirited dogs and a couple of camels
to keep them company, and they are dressed in raggety European clothes, not unlike gypsies; but they retain, as do these remarkable tribespeople in every stage of their development, an almost creepy sense of detachment, even of mysticism. The headman greets you with a handshake and speaks to you in English, the women, huddled over their untidy fires, smile at you warmly enough; but however hard you try you will feel that your conversation is only sliding off some slithery barrier, deflected like light through a prism, that all around you are wavelengths and cross-currents you do not understand, and that these original Australians, miserably hybrid though their condition seems to be, retain some affinity with their empty landscape that no white man, bound within the confines of logic, will ever be able to achieve.

So you fly back to The Alice feeling a little chilled, as though you have just exchanged glances with a mystery; but a pint of ale at the Stewart Arms will soon restore you to banality, and at the end of your day in Alice Springs you should go back to the beginning, just as the sensible visitor to Florence concludes his visit beside the Arno. A mile or two north of the little town is the site of the original Alice, where the old wooden telegraph station that was its
raison
d’être
still meditates in the starlight. Go and end the day there. There will be a rustle of wind in the gum trees, and a croaking of frog armies in the water, and the air is aromatic with dust and foliage, and above you the Southern Cross hangs brilliantly beside the Coal Sack. Down by the water-hole, with a munch and a snort in the half-light, two horses stand sentinel beneath the pepper trees. There is something very sensual about the empty magic of Australia, and such a moment, at the end of The Alice, feels so charged with emotion, echo and pale suggestion that simply experiencing it seems a weak response, and you feel you should really embrace it, ride it, or at least pour it into a tankard and drink it.

Like splendid pickets down the West African coast stand the strongholds of the Portuguese, erected one by one, with guts, bloodshed and slavery, as the caravels of Henry the Navigator probed southwards towards the Cape. They are spacious, flamboyant, arrogant structures, given a sense of dark power by their origins, and a sense of piquancy by the tumble of exotic trees, palm shacks, long-boats and African fizz with which their gorgeous ramparts are now invested: and in their cynical old way they still contribute powerfully to the flavour of those territories, like so many country mansions left high and dry among the housing estates.

I climbed a steep path to the most formidable of these castles, and observed from its walls the distant low confusion of a city. A handsome cheerful cripple, a sort of crystallized crooked smile, led me hobbling up the hill. A man in a blazing blue toga waved at me from a nearby hut. ‘Hey, Massa!’ shouted the fishermen on the beach below, sinewy black figures among their nets and lean canoes. In the village that spilled down the
slope below the castle walls they were celebrating a local holiday: the village chief sat gaudily beneath his ceremonial umbrella, the official linguist brandished his totem of office, the drums thumped away among the mud huts. On the village notice-board it was announced that at the forthcoming obsequies of John Hackman (alias Ankam Tsia), Bishop of the 12th Apostle’s Church, the chief mourners would include Prophetess Grase Thannie and Senior Prophet John Elubah Kuwesie. But I strode through them all, undeterred by their distractions, until I reached the uppermost vantage point of the fortress, and could look down the delectable palm-fringed shoreline to that distant metropolis. Only one capital on earth, I thought, could be approached through quite that combination of sensations, that amalgam of history, gusto, colour and immaturity. Only one city possesses quite such a tart hinterland, and they call it Accra: at one time or another a settlement of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danes and the British, and now the republican capital of Ghana.

It is not beautiful, but it is inescapably exhilarating, not always for the best reasons: a jazzy, high-spirited, ever bubbly place, whose inhabitants are dressed in dazzling multi-coloured togas and love to dance a slow, blaring shuffle known as High Life. Accra has passed through some queer and cloudy political fluctuations since Ghana attained her liberty, but for all the vagaries of statesmanship it still feels elevated by the very fact of independence, like a young man flourishing his door key still, long after his twenty-first birthday. Many of Accra’s gleaming, grinning, vivacious citizens are poor people, very poor, subsisting on dried fish and stringy vegetables, living in squalid tumbledown huts, embroiled in many a medieval tangle of loyalty and superstition: but the city as a whole is well heeled and confident, sustained always by the price of cocoa from the immense plantations of the interior. This is one of those cities that feel inherently lucky, inherently easy-going, where it is all too easy to shrug your shoulders, throw away your statistical pamphlets and go sightseeing.

Or, more pertinently, go gossiping. Accra is not really much to look at, but it never stops talking. Education has bitten deep into its inherited mores, and since it was generally bestowed by Europeans or missionaries, its flavour is sometimes strangely incongruous. The ‘youngmen’ of Accra (as the Ghanaians like to call those who have ripped themselves away from the old outlooks) cannot often tell you the origins of the Golden Stool of the Ashanti, or the outcome of the battle of Amoafo, but they are often embarrassingly well informed about the House of Tudor or pragmatic
sanctions, and are likely to quote Joshua, Shelley or E. M. Forster with disconcerting accuracy. The fine public library of Accra is always busy, and not only with those pallid English housewives, in Horrockses cottons and sandals, to be seen there at tea-time looking for the latest animal best-seller. The press of Accra, reckless, racy, inconsequential, spitting rivalries, ambitions and semi-private jokes, boisterous in misprint, cross-eyed with mixed metaphors, Rabelaisian in abuse and Dickensian in characterization – the indigenous press of Accra is nothing if not vital. The Supreme Court of Accra, during any big hearing, is packed with eager and well-informed enthusiasts, swathed in togas or uncomfortably sealed in reach-me-downs, their big white eyes flickering between the antagonists of a cross-examination like tennis fans at Centre Court. The rich stew of life in Accra is salted always with slander and intrigue, so that any waiter or shop assistant is quite likely to admit you, with a lowering of the voice and a secretive glitter of the pupils, into the latest Cabinet disagreement, and the whole structure of affairs is subject to sudden underhand convulsions, mass arrests or awful denunciations.

Nothing is altogether commonplace in Accra. It is a city of excesses. Public commerce is dominated, physically and figuratively, by the full-blooded, brawny-armed ‘mammies’ of the market, women of highly tempered economic instincts who play an extraordinarily important part in the progress of Ghana. These
grandes
dames
of Accra are flounced in primary colours and half-swamped in dried fish, rolls of dazzling cotton, mounds of murky vegetables, chickens on the claw and cards of elastic, and they are distinguished by a noble Billingsgate spaciousness. Nobody ever hoodwinked an Accra market mammy, except perhaps another one, and no wise politician ignores their interests. It is their money, too, that finances the celebrated ‘mammy-wagons’ of Accra, perhaps the most memorable of all this city’s gay folk spectacles. No form of modern transport is gayer or gaudier than these bright-painted trucks. Their average speed is bone-shakingly high, their cargoes are wonderfully jumbled, and they are emblazoned with curious slogans, some of them pungent (‘A Lonely Woman Is a Man’s Temptation’), some pious (‘Follow the Truth and Obey the Heavens’), some merely enigmatic (‘Why?’ or ‘You Never Can Tell’). You can easily tire of such phenomena, with their brassiness, their clashing colours, their strain of the juvenile: but they do give a kaleidoscopic momentum to the capital, and make you feel as though you are wallowing in a bottle of rather cheap pop.

The Ghanaian House of Assembly is so bursting with African vigour that
the very air seems full of sparks, such as fly from silken textiles when the evening is charged with intimacy. Everything is done very fast and very boisterously, rather as the Keystone Kops might think of doing it. The House seems to be in a constant state of motion, honourable members jumping for microphones, ministers leaping to their feet with caustic replies, fans whirling, and outside the open doors and windows kaleidoscopic glimpses of blue-robed women or men in shirt-sleeves. At Question Time this energetic assembly is at its hilarious best. Few inhibitions then govern the give-and-take of parliamentary exchange. Hoots of laughter echo through the galleries. Fists are brandished and quips hurled between the benches. Sometimes there is a sudden moment of uproar, with everyone shouting at once, and sibilant hissings of ‘Sit down!’ sizzling across the floor, and sometimes you may catch sight of a member pointing with his finger, his shoulders hunched, the whites of his eyes gleaming and his eyebrows raised, as if he is casting some good-natured spell upon the Opposition.

Juvenile? In my reactionary moments, I cannot help thinking so. For all the real pleasures of Accra, all its boisterous kindliness and intelligence, it seems to me the least adult of capital cities. It expresses all that is noisiest and least reassuring about Africa, the melange of primitive or half-understood beliefs, the crossed values, the vacant frivolity. If Moscow is like an old dressing-gown, as Tolstoy thought, then Accra is a fancy-dress pom-pom. This is Africanism almost undiluted, graced by no old Semitic heritage, style of Arab or mystery of Jew, and fast swamping the remnants of imperial order. Historians like to recall that the fascinating Benin bronzes were fashioned only five hundred miles from Accra: but to me, I must confess, this steamy coast of Guinea feels frighteningly devoid of old art, deep wisdom or towering religion, and seems like a nursery shoreline, bickering, giggling and blowing tin trumpets among the gewgaws.

There are still juju murders and Senior Prophets in Accra. There are still magical agencies, seers and wizards. On the lovely bathing beach, among the surfboards and the bathing huts, you may still be shown a palm grove well known to be the domicile of a particularly powerful fetish. In the markets of the city you may still find, brooding among the motor bikes, the snakes’ heads, dried rats, chameleons and monkey skulls of the witch-doctors. Now and then a diner of traditional instincts will still excuse himself from the restaurant of the Ambassador Hotel to pour a precautionary libation in the garden. The average scholastic standard at the
University of Ghana, I am told, is higher than that of most British universities, but a fearful amount of drivel is uttered by its graduates when they emerge into the fizzle of public life. The slogan ‘Freedom and Justice’ is written bold across the Triumphal Arch in Accra: but it often rings sour and sorry, when yet another political malcontent is shut away in silence, or yet another travesty of democracy is foisted upon an excited electorate. When three of the most prominent members of the ruling party were suddenly arrested one morning the official newspaper instantly described them as dangerous opportunists, criminal sycophants and diabolical renegades. ‘Master-adventurer Adamafio and his tribalist gang, spearheaded by himself, Ako Adjei and Cofie-Crabbe; figured erroneously that they could throw dust into the eyes of the nation. This vile trio today stand condemned as the most inhuman band of lunatic power-seekers and ungrateful tribalist ruffians ever to emerge in the struggle.’

This is vivid and full-blooded stuff, and springs directly out of the Gold Coast’s sanguinary past. Accra indeed is full of traditions, from castle walls to chieftaincies, but no certainty of loyalty or purpose underlies them. Adamafio and Cofie-Crabbe figure perennially in the chronicles of these parts, but the old-school abuse of the
Ghanaian
Times
reflects something insecure and jejune in the state of Accra. This is partly the fault of the imperial West, with its slave trade, its sometimes misinformed convictions, its thoughtless missionary zeal: but to my mind –
pace
that delightful crippled cicerone,
pace
the friendly fishermen on the beach,
pace
the genial chief beneath his panoply and that splendid view of Accra from the ramparts of the fortress – to my diehard British mind it is mostly only Africa, lovable and terrifying old Africa, which is noble sometimes, and sometimes cruel, but feels so often like a continent playing at history.

As the traveller wanders across the breadth of Africa, through the welter of animisms and tribal faiths, the witch-doctors and sacred stones and fetishes, the gimcrack Christian deviations, the struggling missions and occasional messiahs – as he journeys through this cauldron of devotions he finds himself upon the outer fringes of Islam; and at once the stately order of that marvellous religion brings a fresh dignity to society, and tinges the air with its ornate magic. Such an outpost of the Muslims is Kano, the principal city of northern Nigeria, where the Emir of Kano lives in state in a splendid rambling palace, and the piles of ground-nuts stand like white pyramids outside the walls.

One of the sad results of the Western mission in Africa has been the vulgarization of the continent. Millions of Africans have been weaned from their precarious inherited mores and stuffed with a heady smattering of education and Christianity. It is entertaining, for a week or two, to observe the frothing and the bubbling, the jazzy effervescence that is often the product of this diet: the irreverent gaiety of slogans and posters, the brassy rhythms of High Life jazz in Accra, the unkempt and often scurrilous newspapers, the earnest schoolmasters discussing Sedgemoor or Voltaire, the perky black barristers with their wigs, the fundamentalist preachers playing upon trumpets and foaming at the mouth. There is tremendous vigour to Westernized Africa, especially along the shorelines of Nigeria and Ghana, and a bottomless reservoir of fun.

After a while, though, you begin to feel the pathos of it all, and to realize that these are temporarily rootless peoples, racked by sensations of inadequacy, unfulfilment or frustration, and deprived of the often scratchy cultures that gave them pride of history. It is probably no more than a sorry but inevitable stage in the development of black Africa, and certainly it is balanced by all manner of material blessings, from polio vaccines to pink chiffon: but stroll through the slums of Lagos one day and consider this sad miscegenation of manners, and you may murmur to yourself, as you pass from the dried monkey heads to the blaring radios: ‘God help us, what a mess we’ve got them into!’ Stretched between the tribal devils and the deep blue sea of progress, between the old religions and the new, the chieftain’s council and Erskine May, many a poor African is a muddle of instincts and aspirations, whistling tunelessly in the dark.