Authors: John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar (44 page)
Contrast Beninia: located between powerful rivals either of which would cheerfully have sacrificed an army or two of burdensome unskilled labourers for the sake of annexing its fine main port and its river-routes through the Mondo Hills; economically non-viable, kept going only by constant foreign aid; and far from being industrialised, backward to a degree exceptional even in Africa.
Thinking of the anomalies gave Norman a headache, but he ploughed on, extending the area of his inquiries until the research department sent back a furious memo demanding whatinole connection events in the first year of the Muslim calendar could have with a twenty-first-century business venture.
Norman felt obscurely that if he could answer that he wouldn’t be so baffled by this hole-in-corner country.
However, the Research Dept was quite right—it was pointless to dig that far back because the records didn’t exist. There were hardly even any archaeological remains. Digging up the past was an expensive luxury in Beninian terms.
Norman sighed, and went back for yet another review of what he had learned.
* * *
“Happy is the country that has no history”—and for a long time the area later called Beninia qualified. Its first impact on the world scene occurred during the heyday of internal African slave-trading, when Arab pressure from the north drove the Holaini—a sub-branch of the Berbers, of Muslim faith and Hamitic race—past Timbuktu toward the Bight of Benin. There they came across an enclave of Shinka, hemmed in on one side by Mandingo and on the other by Yoruba.
These neighbours were accustomed to leaving the Shinka strictly alone, claiming that they were powerful magicians and could steal the heart out of a valiant fighting man. The Holaini scoffed; as good Muslims they discounted the idea of witchcraft, and certainly the unaggressive, welcoming Shinka—whom even the idea of slavery did not seem to arouse to anger—offered no obvious threat.
With the full intention of ranching the Shinka, cattle-fashion, as a constant source of slaves, the Holaini installed themselves as the new masters of the area. But, as though by the magic neighbouring tribes had described, the venture crumbled. After twenty years, no more slave-caravans were formed. The Holaini gradually became absorbed into the base population, leading a quiet rural existence, until by the twentieth century only their dialect and such physical traces as the “northern nose” and breadth of forehead remained to testify to their independent identity.
Superstition—perhaps—accounted for the subsequent unwillingness of the dealers who supplied the European slave-ship captains to tangle with the Shinka. They excused themselves on the specious ground that Shinkas made bad slaves, or that they were sickly, or that they were under the special protection of Shaitan. One or two European-led raids apart, they remained largely unmolested until the age of colonial exploitation.
When the carving was well under way, the British kicked out the Spanish, who had been maintaining a trading-station near the site of the modern Port Mey as an adjunct to their larger settlement on the nearby island of Fernando Po, and let the French in neighbouring Togo understand that Beninia was henceforth shadowed by the Union Jack.
And that, by and large, was that, apart from the legalistic regularisation of the situation into one analogous with Nigeria, the setting up of a “British Crown Colony and Protectorate”.
Until 1971, when the Colonial Office in London was seeking ways of disposing of its last few embarrassing overseas charges. Some, like the smallest Pacific islands, were pretty well hopeless cases, and the best that could be managed was to shuffle them off into someone else’s lap—the Australians’, for example. Beninia did not look at first as though it would pose the least difficulty, however. After all, Gambia, which was about the same size, had been independent for a few years already.
The trouble arose when they tried to find someone to hand over the government to.
There were a good few competent officials in Beninia, but owing to the fact that the Muslim pattern of paternalism conformed to the masculinist prejudices of nineteenth-century English public-school boys, most of them had been recruited among the northern minority, the Holaini. Exactly the same thing had happened in Nigeria. There, following independence, the majority group had revolted against this legacy of Victorian prejudice. The Colonial Office had no wish to repeat that mistake, even though the Shinka seemed to be peculiarly unpolitical. In fact, if they’d had the kindness to organise a proper political party to agitate for independence, the problem would never have arisen.
Casting around, the London bureaucrats hit on a young Beninian who, if he didn’t have a popular following, at least enjoyed popular esteem. Zadkiel Frederick Obomi had been educated in Britain and the United States. He came from a respectable, moderately well-to-do family. His ambition was to become an educational broadcaster, and he was doing jack-of-all-trades work at the only TV station serving the Bight area—lecturing, reading news bulletins, and commenting on current affairs in Shinka and Holaini. He had been seconded to supervise the news coverage of the last meeting of the Organisation for African Unity, and the delegates from Ethiopia and South Africa had both singled him out for praise, so there was no question of his acceptability outside Beninia.
Inside the country it was a different matter, chiefly because he himself had never thought of being president. Eventually, however, he was persuaded that no one else was qualified, and when his name was put to a plebiscite both Shinka and Holaini voters approved him by a thumping majority over a candidate backed largely by Egyptian funds.
Thankfully the British re-named Governor’s House, calling it the Presidential Palace, and went home.
At first, owing to inexperience, the new president seemed to be bumbling along. His first cabinet, chosen in ratio to the population of Holaini versus Shinka with a slight bias towards the former because of their administrative background, accomplished practically nothing. Bit by bit, however, he replaced the British-trained ministers with people of his own choosing, some of whom volunteered to come home from comfortable foreign posts, like the incumbent minister of finance, Ram Ibusa, who had been teaching economics in Accra.
To everyone’s surprise, he coped well with a crisis that threatened him at the very end of his first term.
In former British and French colonies adjacent to Beninia, a commonplace feature of late twentieth-century Africa broke out—tribal quarrels flared up into rioting and sometimes a week or two of actual civil war. Large movements of Inoko and Kpala took place. Since Beninia was handy, and since it wasn’t in turmoil, both tribes’ refugees headed for there.
The people who had kicked them out weren’t interested in what had become of them. It was only later, after the economic facts of life had forced several ex-colonial countries to federate into groups sharing a common European language—such as Mali, Dahomey and Upper Volta into Dahomalia, and Ghana and Nigeria into RUNG—that they became aware of a curious phenomenon.
The Shinka were even poorer than the Inoko and the Kpala, and might have been expected to resent the extra burden the refugees placed on the country’s strained resources. But they had demonstrated no hostility. On the contrary, a generation of foreigners had been raised in Beninia who seemed perfectly contented and immune to all suggestions about insisting that their lands be incorporated with their original home nations.
Almost as though they regarded Obomi with the traditional awe accorded to his “magician” ancestors, the neighbouring giants seesawed back and forth between placation and aggression. The latter usually set in when some internal disorder made the invocation of an outside enemy desirable; the former was rarer, and only followed the intrusion of a common rival from elsewhere. Allegedly the German soldier of fortune whose bungled assassination attempt cost Obomi his eye had been hired and paid in Cairo. The resultant hostility among the Holaini against the notion of Pan-Islam decided the Arab world to return to its accustomed railing about Israel.
But now the long-time calm of Beninia seemed likely to be shattered for good. If a succession dispute followed Obomi’s retirement, the jealous neighbours would certainly pounce. The intervention of GT might prevent the war. Shalmaneser had reviewed the various hypothetical outcomes and given his quasi-divine opinion.
Yet Norman kept being nagged by doubt. After all, Shalmaneser could only judge on the basis of the data he was fed; suppose Elihu had allowed his love for Beninia to colour his views with optimism, and this had affected the computer’s calculations?
It seemed absurdly sanguine to suggest turning a poverty-stricken, famine- and sickness-ridden ex-colony into a bridgehead of prosperity within twenty years. Why, there wasn’t even a university, not even a major technical school—nothing better than a privately financed business school in Port Mey from which the government already skimmed the cream of the graduates.
Of course, they did claim that all the country’s male children acquired a minimum of literacy and numeracy, and a grounding in English as well as one other of their country’s tongues. And there was no disrespect for education in Beninia—they were even shorter of truants than of teachers. Eagerness to learn might make up for a good few deficiencies in other areas.
Might
…
Sighing, Norman gave up worrying. The exclamation-mark shape of Beninia might twist on the map into an imagined question-posing curl, but that was in his mind. The facts were in the real world, and he was acutely aware how he had systematically isolated himself from reality.
* * *
He said as much to Chad Mulligan, on one of the increasingly rare occasions when he was at home long enough to spend a few minutes in talking. The sociologist’s heart had not proved to be in his intention to debauch himself to his grave; habit unweakened by three years in the gutter had dragged him back into familiar patterns of study and argument.
His response to Norman’s remark began with a grimace of disgust. “What you’re up against, codder, is the intractability of the outside world! Okay, I sympathise—I have the same trouble. I can’t keep enough liquor in my guts to rot them the way I planned. Before I pass out, I throw up! So what’s making you so angry with Beninia, hm?”
“Not the country itself,” Norman sighed. “The fact that nobody seems to have noticed this weird anomaly of a whole nation sitting on the edge of a political volcano and hardly getting singed.”
“With a volcanic eruption in progress, whoinole is going to take time out and wonder about folk who are getting on with their ordinary business?” Chad grunted. “Why don’t you save the guesswork until you’ve been there and seen for yourself? When are they sending you over, by the way?”
“Directly the project is finalised,” Norman said. “Elihu and I are going to present it to President Obomi together. Another three or four days, I guess.” He hesitated. “You know something?” he continued. “I’m scared of what I’m going to find when I actually get there.”
“Why?”
“Because…” Norman tugged at his beard with awkward fingers. “Because of Donald.”
“Whatinole does he have to do with it? He’s off the other side of the world.”
“Because I shared this apt with him for years, and always thought of him as a neutral kind of guy, leading a rather dull easy-going life. Not the sort of person you’d form strong opinions about. And then all of a sudden he told me he’d been responsible for the riot I found myself caught up in—down the lower East Side. I told you about that, didn’t I?”
“You talked about it at Guinevere’s party. So did a lot of other people.” Chad shrugged. “Of course, to claim responsibility for starting a riot is arrogant, but I see what you’re setting course for. You mean you’re wondering whether the Beninians are set up the same way he was, capable of starting something disastrous when they blunder out into the big scene.”
“No,” said Norman. “I’m wondering whether I’m the one who’s ignorant and apt to trigger a disaster.”
“Yes, my name’s Chad Mulligan. I’m not dead, if that was going to be the subject of your next silly question. And I don’t give a pint of whaledreck about what you called up to say to me, even if you are from SCANALYZER. If you want me to talk I’ll talk about what
I
want to, not what you want me to. If that’s acceptable plug in your recorders. Otherwise I’m cutting the circuit.
“All right. I’m going to tell you about the poor. You know where to look for a poor man? Don’t go out on the street like a sheeting fool and pick on a street-sleeper in filthy clothes. Up to a few days ago the man you picked on might have been me, and I’m worth a few million bucks.
“And you don’t have to go to India or Bolivia or Beninia to find a poor man, either. You have to go exactly as far as the nearest mirror.
“At this point you’ll probably decide to switch off in disgust—I don’t mean you, codder, taking this down off the phone, I mean whoever gets to hear it if you have the guts to replay it over SCANALYZER. You out there! You’re on the verge of going bankrupt and you aren’t paying attention. I don’t suppose that telling you will convince you, but I’m offering the evidence, in hopes.
“A codder who lives the way I’ve been living for the past three years, without a home or even a suitcase, isn’t necessarily poor, like I said. But free of the things which get in the way of noticing the truth, he has a chance to look the situation over and appraise it. One of the things he can see is what’s changed and what hasn’t in this brave new century of ours.
“What do you give a panhandler? Nothing, maybe—but if you do cave in, you make it at least a fin. After all, his monthly licence costs him double that. So he’s not really poor. Costs have gone up approximately sixfold in the past fifty years, but fifty years ago you were liable to give a panhandler a quarter or a half. Relatively, panhandlers have moved up on the income ladder.
“You haven’t.