The Soccer War (15 page)

I felt an animal fear, a fear that struck me with paralysis; I stood rooted to the ground, as if I was buried up to the neck. I could feel the sweat flowing over me, but under my skin I was as cold as if standing naked in sub-zero frost.

I wanted to live, but life was abandoning me. I wanted to live, but I did not know how to defend my life. My life was going to end in inhuman torment. My life was going to go out in flames.

What did they want from me? They waved a knife before my eyes. They pointed it at my heart. The boss of the operation stuffed my money into his pocket and shouted at me, blasting me with his beery breath: ‘Power! UPGA must get power! We want power! UPGA is power!’ He was shaking, swept up in the passion of power; he was mad on power; the very word ‘power’ sent him into ecstasy, into the highest rapture. His face was flooding sweat, the veins on his forehead were bulging and his eyes were shot with blood and madness. He was happy and he began to laugh in joy. They all started laughing. That laughter saved me.

They ordered me to drive on.

The little crowd around the roadblock shouted ‘UPGA!’ and held up their hands with two fingers stretched out in the ‘V’ sign: Victory for UPGA on all fronts.

About four kilometres down the road the third roadblock was burning. The road was straight and I could see the smoke a long way off, and then I saw the fire and the activists. I could not turn back. There were two barriers behind me. I could only go forward. I was trapped, falling out of one ambush and into another. But now I was out of money for ransom, and I knew that if I didn’t pay up they would burn the car. Above all, I didn’t want another beating. I had been whipped, my shirt was in tatters and I reeked of benzene.

There was only one way out: to run the roadblock. It was
risky, because I might wreck the car or it might catch fire. But I had no choice.

I floored it. The roadblock was a kilometre ahead. The speedometer needle jumped: 110, 120, 140. The car shimmied and I gripped the wheel more tightly. I leaned on the horn. When I was right on top of it I could see that the bonfire stretched all the way across the road. The activists were waving their knives for me to stop. I saw that two of them were winding up to throw bottles of gasoline at the car and for a second I thought, so, this is the end, this is the end, but there was no turning back. There was no turning …

I smashed into the fire, the car jumped, there was a hammering against the belly pan, sparks showered over the windshield. And suddenly—the roadblock, the fire and the shouting were behind me. The bottles had missed. Hounded by terror, I drove another kilometre and then I stopped to make sure the car wasn’t on fire. It wasn’t on fire. I was all wet. All my strength had left me; I was incapable of fighting; I was wide open, defenceless. I sat down on the sand and felt sick to my stomach. Everything around me was alien. An alien sky and alien trees. Alien hills and manioc fields. I couldn’t stay there, so I got back in and drove until I came to a town called Idiroko. On the way I passed a police station and I stopped there. The policemen were sitting on a bench. They let me wash and straighten myself out.

I wanted to return to Lagos, but I couldn’t go back alone. The commandant started to organize an escort. But the policemen were afraid to travel alone. They needed to borrow a car, so the commandant went into town. I sat on a bench reading the
Nigerian Tribune
, the UPGA paper. The paper was dedicated to party activities and the party’s fight for power. ‘Our furious battle,’ I read, ‘is continuing.
For instance, our activists burned the eight-year-old pupil Janet Bosede Ojo of Ikerre alive. The girl’s father had voted for the NNDP.’ I read on: ‘In Ilesha the farmer Alek Aleke was burned alive. A group of activists used the “Spray-and-Lite” method [also known as ‘UPGA candles’] on him. The farmer was returning to his fields when the activists grabbed him and commanded him to strip naked. The farmer undressed, fell to his knees and begged for mercy. In this position he was sprayed with benzene and set afire.’ The paper was full of similar reports. UPGA was fighting for power, and the flames of that struggle were devouring people.

The commandant returned, but without a car. He designated three policemen to ride in mine. They were afraid to go. In the end they got in, pointed their rifles out the windows, and we drove off that way, as if in an armoured vehicle. At the first roadblock the fire was still burning but there was nobody in sight. The next two roadblocks were in full swing, but when they saw the police they let us through. The policemen weren’t going to allow the car to be stopped; they didn’t want to get into a fight with the activists. I understood—they, lived here and they wanted to survive. Today they had rifles, but usually they went unarmed. Many policemen had been killed in the region.

At dusk we were in Lagos.

God’s victim, I have been lying in Lagos for two months now like Lazarus, struggling against illness. It is some sort of tropical infection, blood poisoning or a reaction to an unknown venom, and it is bad enough to make me swell up and leave my body covered with sores, suppurations and carbuncles. I have no strength left to fight the pain, so I ask Warsaw for permission to return. I have often been sick in Africa, since the tropics beget everything in excess, in exaggeration, and the law of intensified propagation and variety applies to bacteria and infections. There is no way out: if you want to enter the most sombre, treacherous and untrodden recesses of this land, you have to be prepared to pay the reckoning with your health, if not your life. Yet every hazardous passion is like this: a Moloch that wants to devour you. In this situation, some opt for a paradoxical state of existence—so that, on arriving in Africa, they disappear into luxurious hotels, never venture outside the pampered neighbourhoods of the whites, and, in short, despite finding themselves geographically in Africa, they continue to live in Europe—except that it’s a substitute Europe, reduced and second-rate. Indeed, such a lifestyle does not agree with the authentic traveller and lies beyond the means of the reporter, who must experience everything at his own cost.

More devastating than malaria or amoebas, fevers or
contagion is the disease of loneliness, the disease of the tropical depression. Defending yourself against it takes iron resistance and a strong will. Yet even then it is not easy. (Here begin a description of the depression.) Describe the extremities of fatigue after empty days that pass purposelessly. Afterwards the sleepless nights, the morning listlessness, the slow immersion in sticky, clotting mucus, in an unpleasant and repulsive fluid. Now you look at yourself with loathing. Now you are repulsively white. The flavourless, unappetizing whiteness. Chalky, waxy, freckled, mottled, blood-blistered white skin—in this climate, in this sun! Horrible! In addition, everything is sweaty: head, back, belly, buttocks, all as if it had been left under a tap that had been carelessly turned-off so that there is a continuous—emphasize that,
continuous
—dripping of a warm, colourless, insistently sharp-smelling fluid. Sweat.

‘Oh, I see that you perspire a great deal.’

‘Yes, ma’am, and yet it’s healthy. Perspiration in the tropics is, if you will, health. Whoever perspires can bear the climate. It won’t wear him out.’

‘And you know, I simply can’t perspire. A little bit, of course, but it’s really nothing. I can’t imagine why.’

‘To perspire you need to drink a lot. Drink and drink, whatever is available. Juices, soft drinks and a little alcohol do you some good, too. It’s better to perspire than to urinate. The kidneys work less.’ Oh, God, those endless conversations about sweat, until the ears burn.

‘But it’s a natural thing. Perspiring isn’t shameful.’

‘And you know, there’s something psychological to it, too. If you point out to someone that he is perspiring, he immediately begins perspiring even more.’

‘You’re right, ma’am. At this moment, I’ve just started dripping with perspiration.’

Thank you, sir and madam, for the conversation—
and you think: poor white people overwhelmed by the tropics, thrashing about in the tropics like fish on the beach, packed together, flaccid, crumpled, wrung out and, precisely, sweaty (she less, he more). Describe the characteristic sweat complex, which is in fact a weakness complex.

In the tropics the white feels weakened, or downright weak, whence comes the heightened tendency to outbursts of aggression. People who are polite, modest or even humble in Europe fall easily into rage here, get into fights, destroy other people, start feuds, fall prey to megalomania, grow touchy about their prestige and significance and go around completely devoid of self-criticism, bragging about the position and the influence they have at home. From the summits of fancied authority they swear vengeance upon their enemies (and the enemy is no imperialist politician, but the ordinary co-worker at the next desk) and if someone told them that they ought to have their head examined (which I often felt like doing) they would be mortally offended. People make spectacles of themselves without even thinking about it. But then again, if it were otherwise there would be no literature. Writers would have nothing to observe. All of it—the weakness and the aggression, the loathing and the mania—is a product of the tropical depression that is also symptomized by wild swings of emotion. Here are two friends sitting at the bar for several hours, drinking beer. Through the windows they can see the waves of the Atlantic, palms, girls on the beach. None of it means anything to them. They are sunk in depression; they have wall eyes, pained spirits, atrophied bodies. They are silent and will remain completely listless all evening. Suddenly one of them picks up his mug and slams the other one across the head. Screams, blood and the thump of a body hitting the floor. What was it? Exactly
nothing. Or rather, the following occurred: the depression torments you and you try to free yourself of it. But the requisite strength is not born in a moment. It takes time to accumulate it in sufficient quantity to overcome the depression. You drink beer and wait for that blessed moment. And there is a further pathological deviation evoked by the action of the tropics. Namely, in the period leading up to the blessed moment in which you will be able to overcome the depression calmly and with dignity, a surplus of strength arises in you—no one knows from where—a surplus that blows up and assaults the brain in a wave of blood, and in order to vent that surplus you have to crack your innocent friend across the skull. This is the depressive explosion—a phenomenon known to all habitués of the tropics. If you are the witness of such a scene, you need not step in—there is no further reason to do so: that one blow frees a person of the surplus and he is now a normal, conscious individual, free of the depression. Describe other behaviour from periods of depression. Physiological changes in chronic states: the slumber of cortical cells, the numbness in the fingertips, the loss of sensitivity to colours and the general dulling of vision, the transient loss of hearing. There would be a lot to say.

At the beginning of the 1960s Africa was a fascinating world. I wrote volumes about it (I haven’t mentioned that the press agencies insist on a correspondent’s writing and writing, without pause, without stopping for breath—I don’t want to say without thinking, even though such a prospect is also possible from time to time—that they demand constant telexes, dispatches, some by post or with returning travellers, an unending stream of information,
commentary, reporting, opinions and evaluations, because only when the folios full of his collected correspondence are breaking at the seams and spilling out of the cabinets back at the home office can he count on their saying approvingly: That one’s all right. He’s really good). I too wrote volumes of information and commentary, of which not a trace remains. But our job is like a baker’s work—his rolls are tasty as long as they’re fresh; after two days they’re stale; after a week they’re covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out.

Some time after sending the ‘Burning Roadblocks’ piece to Warsaw, I received a telegram from my boss Michal Hofman, then the managing editor of the Polish Press Agency. ‘I kindly request,’ I read in the telegram, ‘that once and for all you put an end to these exploits that could end in tragedy.’ The once and for all referred to previous predicaments that I really might not have been able to get out of. My boss treated me with patience and understanding. He tolerated my adventures and my pathological lack of discipline. At my most irresponsible I would suddenly break contact with Warsaw without having told them my plans and would disappear without a trace: throw myself into the jungle, float down the Niger in a dugout, wander through the Sahara with nomads. The main office, not knowing what had happened or how to look for me, would, as a last resort, send telegrams to various embassies. Once, when I showed up in Bamako, our embassy there showed me a telegramme: ‘Should Kapuściński happen to show up in your territory, please inform PAP through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.’

In Lagos, when I was ill, I read through
Tristes Tropiques
. Claude Lévi-Strauss has been staying in the Brazilian jungles, carrying out ethnographic research among the Indian tribes. He is running into difficulties and resistance from the Indians; he is discouraged and exhausted.