Travels with Myself and Another (24 page)

Local politics seem to be about the usual; there’s an election for the government, hand in hand with the granting of independence. The President then takes over and gradually removes those people who are not of his tribe (main point) and party. Here President Tombelbaye (delicious name) has invented a sweet touch; those who are booted out are “foreigners,” not native hundred-percent Chadians. I think all these countries will have one election, supervised by the retiring colonial power, and that the President then elected will stay in for life, unless (until?) there’s a palace putsch or assassination; and I do not see how it could be otherwise.

The use of the word democracy in these parts is more of our passion for self-deception and lust for the word rather than the fact. The blacks know no native form of government except the traditional absolute rule of the chiefs; the President is the super-chief, that’s all. They cannot read (not enough of them to mention) and the jolly first election is done with symbols; vote for the elephant or the hippo or whatever pleases your fancy. After that a ruling clique will emerge everywhere, but power cannot be too obnoxious here because communications are so bad—hard to catch the “enemies of the régime.” The tiniest possible proportion of the people in these new “republics” must be engaged in politics anyhow; corruption and graft are nearly private enterprise.

To cheer myself up, I painted a giraffe with love from memory, washed clothes and played solitaire. Ah Africa, land of romance and adventure.

February 8:
Tidbit to add to many others. When H. leaves, which will be soon, he expects the mobile film unit to survive him by a few months. The car is American made and spare parts have to be ordered from the U.S.—first you have to know what you need and then find it in a technical catalogue. The car is also not built for these roads. No car is built for African roads which are not suitable for four-wheeled, power-driven transport, but the Landrover, being the nearest thing in an automobile to a tank, is probably the best bet. Then the locals will not be able to care for, repair, or even use the fine camera equipment. End of story.

All the whites (except H.) object to this place, but they have unworried, unlined faces. They may be bored but not harassed.
“C’est l’Afrique”
replaces
“C’est la vie.”
It is not an exhilarating spot, this Fort Lamy.

Late afternoon, H. appeared to announce that he cannot go south. His landlord, the mobile film unit chauffeur, is diagnosed as having galloping consumption and must be bundled off to hospital at once. The rest of the compound has to be found (the wife has gone away to visit her mother) and everyone has to be tested for TB including H. He is now their nanny, a role whites do find themselves in. Also a child in the family cut off its toe last night on a broken teapot. H. beside himself, with these new physical and moral responsibilities.

I am sick of Fort Lamy and indeed of West Africa. I want to get out. Desperately. This feeling of being clamped in a boredom as acute as pain, and as solid as prison walls, is something I’ve felt before—in China. There’s a plane to the frontier at Abeshé day after tomorrow. I can hardly bear to think of the day’s wait.

February 9:
To do something, to pass the blind time, I hired the Mairie launch and went on the Logone river, which joins the Chari here. We steamed mildly up the stream to Kousseri. The houses were of adobe, built like baby forts. In the market, Mandara women (the tribe of Ali, the Elephant King) wore myriad short braids on their heads and deeply incised scars on their faces and nothing much else. A young girl had a scar—a narrow black welt—running straight between her brows on to her nose, thus achieving a look of hideous anxiety which a lifetime would, with bad luck, leave on any of us. The Banana women (another tribe) are the ugliest to date, almost too ugly to look at, with anthropoid features, and lip and nostril plugs, and shocking bodies.

The French part of the village looks like movies of the Foreign Legion with the Commandant’s house, the fort and the Mairie, crumbling, white, isolated under the dull white sky, shrouded in dust, the end of the world.

All along the river the blacks sit. They are capable of doing this for hours, without moving a muscle. The young men are given to exhibitionism and have lovely bodies to exhibit—naked, gleaming black against the golden sandbanks. Modesty must be an instinct with women only; the men do not bother to move from a crouch, while defecating, no matter who passes.

Farther up, the villages are made of rush mats, bound together loosely. These people must be as poor as it is possible to be, and with as few needs as wild animals. No one is fat.

In the evening a French archaeologist came to have a drink with me at the hotel. He was another type; quick, lively, absorbed in his work. Possibly he keeps this fine intellectual tone by living over half the year in Paris. He startled me by calling a waiter and telling him to empty the ashtray, and bring a fresh cloth for the table, before serving the drinks. It would not have occurred to me to make such huge demands; I’d gloomily go on taking the squalor.

The archaeologist told me that his assistants, all blacks, would be talking both merrily and intelligently, but when a white man (not himself, he is in their confidence) came in, they would shut up and look and act like stupid wooden images. It is clear that schizophrenia operates with the blacks; and their mistrust of the whites makes them behave in just the way which infuriates the whites—to wit, like mute goops. My answer to this is: let the whites get out, let the blacks see how they can run the show by themselves, let them feel at home until such time as they’ll learn to be themselves and not to have whatever complexes they have now. But of course that won’t be done as the blacks, who know enough to have needs, need what the white man has brought with him: all our modern aids-to-living, from electric light to telephones to cars, planes, fridges, and the amusements of the mind too, including archaeology.

They cannot dominate modern machinery, and I wonder when they will be able to. I think it would take a brilliant intelligence to learn—from scratch—the things any American boy seems to know easily, almost by instinct, simply because he has been brought up with, surrounded by, machinery. But how very complex a gramophone would seem, if one were alive in the seventeenth century and suddenly given one. So I suppose the whites will stick around, grudgingly and sullenly required, for quite some time. The whites in turn will linger on either because they have Africa in their bones and really love it and cannot imagine another life, or plainly for pay.

Lebeuf, the man who digs, told me that the oldest human cranium had been found in Chad, but surely Leakey found it in Tanganyika. He also said that the Sao culture here dates from the tenth century. I’d like to know if there have been many changes since that time, outside of the towns.

February 10:
This day will go down in memory with days in China, in the special chamber of horrors kept for such memories. But I feel proud to have survived.

I was called at 3 a.m.—one half-hour late—with fifteen minutes to pack, dress, swallow tea, and leave for the plane. Frantic: my one wish is to get out and if I missed the plane it would be days before another left. Downstairs I found the air crew, they also had been called late. No one protested; it is not worthwhile.

We took off at 4 a.m. in the dark. A handsome grey-haired man sat next to me; he proved to be the invisible Frenchman who keeps telecommunications running. He has lived in Africa for twenty years and loves it; he cannot think of living elsewhere. He said that expensive and complicated telephone switchboards arrived from France (France is fairy godmother to Chad as well as to Cameroun) and these were either broken almost at once, or unused because there was no black personnel to work them. He says this without heat, shrugging.

There must be some reason, which I am unable to see, for continuing this charade—African independence, whites behind the scenes keeping whatever does run still running. Why bother? Why have telecommunications? For whom? When and if the blacks learn to handle these white toys, let them buy them and use them; possibly the blacks would be happy enough without them; very few ever have contact with our sort of equipment anyhow. I don’t see it. But this have-your-cake-and-eat-it performance keeps Mr Goy, my companion, in Africa; and he is content.

As the sun rose, we came to Largeau. Real desert and the first I’ve seen. The sand is reddish gold in this light, beautiful beyond words (so that I understand all the Englishmen who have fallen in love with this landscape), driven by the wind into symmetrical shapes. The wind forces the sand into a curve, with hollowed centre; all these great waves of sand face the same way. I do not think it can be described, painted or photographed so that the impression of untouched, harmonious elegance would come across. Largeau is an oasis with hundreds and hundreds of royal palms, and whitewashed huts and houses clustered under them. Surrounded by the desert, it is the one splendour I have seen, finer than anything before in Africa. I am filled with regret that I did not stay here instead of in Fort Lamy—and no one in Fort Lamy has either seen or felt this wonder, since Largeau was spoken of disparagingly as nothing much.

The air, at this hour, is wildly exciting, clean and cold; feels like high mountains. We walked across the field to the officers’ mess, to try to scrounge breakfast. The officers’ mess is a small hangar; broken bottles were being swept up, like snow, by a languid black; a small anti-tank gun was parked inside the door. The officers and gentlemen looked a frowsy lot (the French do not dress for dinner or any other meal, in the wilderness), dirty and inhospitable. We transit passengers sat on benches at one end of the long board table while the officers sat at the other, and drank hot coffee and ate thick slabs of bread. It turned out that I needn’t have been so hesitant about coming in, so polite about intruding; we were charged for breakfast and that was that.

On to Abeshé, where we arrived at 10 a.m. My arrangements had been made by telephone. I was to be met and taken from here in a Landrover by Mr Kabbabé, a Lebanese. The distance between Abeshé, near the Chad frontier, and El Geneina, the first village inside the Sudan, is 123 miles. At El Geneina, tomorrow, I am to take the Sudan Airways plane to Khartoum. My Landrover ride to El Geneina cost $80—I thought that stiff for 123 miles but was in no position to argue. If you want to go on your way, in Africa, you take whatever transport you can get and pay what is asked.

Mr Kabbabé’s son-in-law met me at the airport and drove me to the Kabbabé residence and shop, adjoining the market. Abeshé is flat and boiling hot. It is on the pilgrim’s route to Mecca, and a caravan centre; the most alluring sight was the camel park, where—instead of cars—are massed camels, looking long-lashed, dusty, and resigned in a well-bred way. The market is large, malodorous, and the natives are again tattooed, semi-naked.

Mr Kabbabé does not live here all year round; his daughter and son-in-law (and their child) are the resident managers of the family business. These people are very rich, having made a fortune out of this kind of small-time trading. The accumulation of money is the ruling interest in their lives. They do not notice the ugliness and discomfort of their home, and seem perfectly content. Family ties are sufficient for the private emotions, and the money rolls in, penny by penny. Western whites would be out of their minds in no time in such a place, not the Lebanese Kabbabés.

They had decided to make an outing of my journey; Mr Kabbabé, his “boy” (an old, very intelligent black), his daughter and a French peroxided lady friend came along for the ride. We were tightly packed in—we three ladies in the back seat—and off we went, with a picnic lunch, at 11 a.m.

Very soon, I decided that Mr Kabbabé was going to earn every cent of his $80. He is a bad driver, of the sort who goes fast for a bit (only a short bit, no more was possible) and brakes suddenly at the edge of a deep hole lined with stones. There may be worse roads in the world, but I do not know them. We braced with our feet against the constant jolting, and clung to the sides of the Landrover to keep from breaking our necks at the sudden stops or when negotiating potholes. The heat was what could be expected, only more so, and wet; we were soaked, with dust caked on us, and I was dead tired by one o’clock.

The Kabbabé daughter and her chum were gallant and cheerful and made potty female conversation and laughed like idiot babes at each spine-cracking jolt. When it looked as if even the four-wheel drive would not get us up the sandy sides of the dry wadis, I suggested that the ladies walk; this was also life insurance. Mr Kabbabé did not inspire trust; but he would not let the black man drive. Yet all day long, the black man warned him of the road, pointing out—with marvellous vision—the pitfalls ahead. Mr Kabbabé has a will of iron, he can’t be a day under sixtyfive, and he’s fat and soft, and it was a punishing journey.

We stopped in the shade, of which there was not much—this is scrub country, dry as a bone, with wizened thorn trees and brush—to eat lunch. Now Mlle Kabbabé (don’t know her married name) showed a facet of her nature, no doubt both inherited and cultivated, which explains how the Kabbabés have become rich: she is a miser. She could hardly bear to part with the ample lunch she had brought; every bit was offered tentatively, alert to withdraw it; thus she managed not to give us enough. She was stingy with the water, of which we had plenty. Since I could not get through my bread, nothing much to spread on it, and little water to help it down, she saved the crust, saying she could not throw away bread.

We passed camels munching thorn trees and, in the dry wadis, black Moslems lying in the shade, too weary to be interested in us; they are fasting, and to drink no water from sunrise to sunset in this heat must be a severe strain. We passed one car all day; the Kabbabés knew the occupants. No one would willingly go on this road twice. Not a road, a murderous camel track.

At Adré, we had to go through Chadian customs. The black official was shouting with rage—the ill-humoured defensiveness of the black officials is universal. They are not up to their jobs, they fear mockery, they behave like brutes. A man who may have been a Syrian, not white and not black, was here the tactful
éminence grise—
he got us through. The black official was in such a temper, what with us and a young German couple arriving in the country, and all these passports in different languages, that I feared he was going to throw us out and close the frontier in a pet. One neither argues nor explains, above all one does not smile; one takes it.