The Mimic Men (30 page)

We began in bluff. We continued in bluff. But there was a
difference. We began in innocence, believing in the virtue of the smell of sweat. We continued with knowledge, of poverty and power. The colonial politician is an easy object of satire. I wish to avoid satire; I will leave out the stories of illiteracy and social innocence. Not that I wish to present him as grander or less flawed than he is. It is that his situation satirizes itself, turns satire inside out, takes satire to a point where it touches pathos if not tragedy. Out of his immense violation words come easily to him, too easily. He must go back on his words. In success he must lay aside violation. He must betray himself and in the end he has no cause save his own survival. The support he has attracted, not ideal to ideal, but bitterness to bitterness, he betrays and mangles: emancipation is not possible for all.

We had spoken, for instance, of the need to get rid of the English expatriates who virtually monopolized the administrative section of our civil service. We had represented their presence as an indignity and an intolerable strain on our Treasury. They received overseas allowances; their housing was subsidized; every three years they and their families were given passages to London. Each expatriate cost us twice as much as a local man. One degree less of innocence would have shown us how incapable we were of doing without expatriates: they were so numerous that to pay them all compensation would have wrecked our finances for at least two years, and we were in no position to break agreements. Besides, not a few of the higher technical men, in forestry and agriculture, were subsidized by London, under a generous scheme for colonial aid.

We let the issue hang. We issued a statement about our confidence in the loyalty of the civil service; and from our own lower ministerial people there emanated from time to time disingenuous parables about the black and white keys of the piano working together to create harmony. In fact, we were beginning to discover in ourselves a deep reluctance
to render the civil service more local. In the secretive atmosphere of our own power game some people preferred to be served by men who were no threats to them, who at the end of their service would return to their own country.

This did not satisfy the local men. They had been among our most intelligent supporters. Now they felt betrayed; and a man of fifty does not accept the message, however sympathetically given, that he will receive promotion after his superior of forty-five has worked out a life-contract. There was much discontent. It crept into
White Paper,
the civil service journal which, until our advent, contained lists of appointments and transfers and retirements, news of people on leave, reports of salary negotiations, and sometimes a very carefully written short story which usually began with people drinking, elaborately, in a bar and one man being reminded of a strange incident. We decided to break one or two of the higher and more vocally disappointed local men. It was not hard.
White Paper
helped us. We contrasted the old acquiescence with the new irreverence and suggested that it was the new régime that was being affronted. The offending civil servants were coloured men; they spent their leaves in England and sent their children to English schools; they sought to keep their complexions clear and their hair straight by selective marriages. Their punishment was just. Nothing we said was untrue; the public approved.

From London there presently came more offers of technical aid and experts on short-term contracts. We gratefully accepted; so that in the end there were more expatriates than before. Some of our ministers took pains to be seen in public with their English permanent secretaries, who behaved impeccably. It was what these ministers offered their followers: the spectacle of the black man served by the white: the revolution we claimed to have created.

Satire creeps in. But understand the colonial politician. It might have been personal indignities that drove him on.
He can reply in success only with personal dignity, and for some little time it satisfies his followers. He is a symbol; he holds out hope for all. It is part of his function then to turn to the trappings of power: the motorcar marked M, the suits on the hottest days, the attendant white men and women. Understand, too, his jumpiness. He knows his own futility; and every time he returns from the rich world his delighted reaction to his country – ‘At least this portion of the world is mine’ – is quickly lost in the uneasiness he feels at the precariousness of his position. For the future he cannot read he must lay up money; uneasiness turns to panic even on that ceremonial drive from airport to city which also takes him past the compound of the tall ochre-and-red overseers’ houses. Understand the jumpiness, the sensitivity to criticism, the solitude.

Understand Browne’s irrational, panicky behaviour, the disappearance of his frivolity, his angry descents among us and the people, and together with the assertion of his personal dignity his proclamation now not of distress alleviated but of distress just discovered, and greater than before. He had settled in the role of folk-leader. He did not have the courage to go beyond that; he had come to terms with the bitterness and self-disgust his role must have brought him. His speeches altered, though to the public their substance remained the same. Whereas before he had spoken of distress as though speaking only to the distressed, now he seemed to be addressing the guilty as well. He shrieked at them, he lamented, he tried to terrify. His defiance became as shameful as the thing he preached against. He was, I saw, in competition with his inferiors. But it paid off. It made him into a figure of a kind; it won him paragraphs in weeklies of international circulation. The outsiders who would have been chilled by his earlier appeals to dignity and stoicism, because such appeals would have excluded them, were now flattered by the more recognizable anguish he proclaimed
and were willing to recognize him as a leader at last. Even if there had been the will to go forward from the emptiness of his position, this recognition would have weakened it.

Our correspondence continued, that oblique irrelevant exchange which yet, as I can now see, revealed so much; and it was from this correspondence that I began to feel that more and more he would have liked to step down from the role that imprisoned him, as once his house next to the Kremlin barber shop had imprisoned him. In his letters he took me back to the past, back to London, back to the writing of his unfinished novel, back to Isabella Imperial and the days of my father’s agitation, back to the child who had been dressed and powdered and, to the delight of his parents and envy of his schoolfellows, had sung that so successful coon song. From these letters I could gather not only his contempt for our colleagues who were no longer made sharp by their personal bitterness; not only his contempt for the endless stream of mendicants who appealed to him in the name of their common race and their common past; I began to feel that I was entering a fantasy which was like my own. Here was more than longing for the past we had destroyed, of erratic magazines with statements of policy, of occasional pamphlets, of quick ideas worked out in bars. Here was a longing for different landscapes, a different world, where a child’s first memory of school was of taking an apple to the teacher and where, in essays at least, days were spent on temperate farms. Here was a longing, like my own, for freedom and what we considered the truth of our personalities. In fantasy, perhaps, this truth was one of the things success ought to have brought; the disappointments of fantasy are not the less real. So we each to the other explained our actions or inaction – what else, I see, was the purpose of my own ponderous essay on Pompey – while we continued to be political colleagues, each supporting the other.

It was in the third year of our government that there occurred the incident which made Isabella notorious; and yet it did not lessen our reputation outside for stability and good sense. It was the tasteless idea of the
Cercle Sportif
to celebrate Browne’s birthday with a fancy-dress ball, and it was the tasteless idea of some people to turn up as African tribesmen with spears and little beards. Word got to Browne before the evening was over – a waiter at the
Cercle
had thought it his duty – and on the following morning instant deportation orders had been served on everyone at the party who could be deported. A number of expatriate civil servants were caught in this way.

For two or three days Browne raved, in public meetings, in the Council, on the radio. He seemed to have gone off his head. He was like a man anxious to stir up a racial uprising. The newspapers at last objected. One ran a cartoon showing our airport lounge with three doors: Arrivals, Departures, Deportures. Browne instantly calmed down. He issued a reasonable statement about his and the government’s attitudes to racial clubs. There was no objection to them, he said, provided they were not maintained in any open or hidden way by public funds; there was no objection to the
Cercle Sportif
as such because it was no longer a place where ‘decisions concerning the deepest interests of our country are taken over whisky-and-soda’. His outburst had embarrassed many of us. But it did him no harm. It strengthened his position and won him a good deal of sympathetic foreign press comment; his subsequent statement about racial clubs was considered statesmanlike by outsiders and ‘diplomatic’ by his supporters. Poor Browne! Into what a position had he manoeuvred himself? Did he still know what he thought about anything?

There was a sequel. About a month later there began to circulate an anonymous satirical tale called
The Niger and the Seine.
It was in English but so closely modelled on
Candide
it read like a translation from the French. Slavery has just been abolished, and the daughter of a French creole family comes home one day and announces that she is going to marry a Negro. Her worthy statement about her motives is cut short by her father, who embraces her. He not only agrees to the marriage but promises to do what he can to rehabilitate the Negro and the Negro’s family. He will send his son-in-law to Paris and pay for his education. All this is done and soon there is established on the island a Negro family of some substance. Their descendants continue the practice of inter-racial marriage. So too do the descendants of the French family: their load of guilt is heavy and their liberalism is tenacious. In time both families undergo some degree of racial alteration. It happens, then, that one day the daughter of the Negro family, now indistinguishable from white, comes home and announces that she wishes to marry the heir of the French family, now totally black. Her father refuses; the air is blue with racial abuse. The girl kills herself. The liberal cycle is over; it has served its purpose; it will not be repeated.

The Niger and the Seine
was a polished piece of work, fine, witty, piercing, almost unbearable in its cruelty. Nothing as outspoken had been written about Isabella since Froude’s visit. It brought to the discussion of racial attitudes a brutality that had been tacitly outlawed on our island. Out of violation there had grown a certain balance and order. Now, with the fancy-dress ball, Browne’s outburst, and this satirical pamphlet, it became clear that this order was breaking down. And of course it was the intruders, those who stood between the mutual and complete comprehension of master and slave, who were to suffer.

S
O
we brought drama of a sort to the island. I will claim this as one of our achievements. Drama, however much we fear it, sharpens our perception of the world, gives us some sense of ourselves, makes us actors, gives point and sometimes glory to each day. It alters a drab landscape. So it frequently happens – what many have discovered – that in conditions of chaos, which would appear hostile to any human development, the human personality is in fact more varied and extended. And this is creation indeed! It might be that I write subjectively, from the order of this suburban hotel set in the roar of this industrial city – once of such magical light – whose busyness does not conceal the fact of its death, revealed whenever an interior is entered and that busyness resolves itself into its component parts.
Who comes here? A Grenadier. What does he want? A pot of beer.

The drama we created did buoy me up. It abolished for me the tedium I had known in childhood and associated with the landscape: those hot, still Sunday afternoons when my father wandered vacantly about our old wooden house and bare yard in his vest and pants and sometimes applied himself to cleaning, meticulously, his bicycle for the drudgery of the week ahead. And I will record the private game I played from the beginning. It was the game of naming. I would begin a speech: ‘I have just come from a meeting at the corner of Wellington and Cocoye Streets.…’ Dull streets of
concrete-and-tin houses; but it gave me pleasure to name them, as it gave me pleasure to name documents and statements after the villages or towns where they had been first outlined. So I went on, naming, naming; and, later, I required everything – every government building, every road, every agricultural schen.e – to be labelled. It suggested drama, activity. It reinforced reality. It reinforced that sense of ownership which overcame me whenever I returned to the island after a trip abroad: do not think I was exempt from that feeling. Drama buoyed me up in my activity, and there was drama in that naming. Administration had been unobtrusive before. Now we, the chief actors, however powerless, however finally futile, were public figures, remarked on wherever we went. There was drama in that power game, from which I had withdrawn. There was one level at which divisions and alignments were public property; there was another level at which it was possible to pretend that they didn’t exist. Drama walked with us; it was not displeasing. I will claim it as an achievement, though the consequences for me were far from pleasant.

Our energies went, then, on making public what already existed. We were busy. We opened schools which before would have opened their doors to children without much fanfare; we cut ribbons across brief stretches of country road; we opened laundries, shoe-shops and filling stations. We were photographed with visitors from American or German travel agencies, who said the correct things; we were photographed shaking hands with the representatives of a French motorcar firm who had come to assess the potential of a regional agency. We attached ourselves to all the activity of the island and to whatever, in a territory like ours, passed for industrialization or investment,