Power, Freedom, and Identity Theme Analysis

It was as a lycée boy that Ferdinand came to the shop. He wore the regulation white shirt and short white trousers. It was a simple but distinctive costume; and—though the short trousers were a little absurd on someone so big—the costume was important both to Ferdinand and to Zabeth. Zabeth lived a purely African life; for her only Africa was real. But for Ferdinand she wished something else. I saw no contradiction; it seemed to me natural that someone like Zabeth, living such a hard life, should want something better for her son. This better life lay outside the timeless ways of village and river. It lay in education and the acquiring of new skills; and for Zabeth, as for many Africans of her generation, education was something only foreigners could give.

Ferdinand could only tell me that the world outside Africa was going down and Africa was rising. When I asked in what way the world outside was going down, he couldn’t say […] I found that the ideas of the school discussion had in his mind become jumbled and simplified. Ideas of the past were confused with ideas of the present. In his lycée blazer, Ferdinand saw himself as evolved and important, as in the colonial days. At the same time he saw himself as a new man of Africa, and important for that reason. Out of this staggering idea of his own importance, he had reduced Africa to himself; and the future of Africa was nothing more than the job he might do later on.

They were not a sturdy people. They were very small and slightly built. Yet, as though to make up for their puniness in that immensity of river and forest, they liked to wound with their hands… More than once, at night, outside a bar or little dance hall, I saw what looked like a drunken pushing and shoving, a brawl with slaps, turn to methodical murder, as though the first wound and the first spurt of blood had made the victim something less than a man… I was unprotected. I had no family, no flag, no fetish.

This is Zabeth’s world […] But Zabeth’s world was living, and this was dead. That was the effect of those masks lying flat on the shelves, looking up not at forest or sky but at the underside of other shelves […] That was the impression only of a moment, though. Because in that dark, hot room, with the mask smells growing stronger, my own feeling of awe grew, my sense of what lay all around us outside. It was like being on the river at night. The bush was full of spirits; in the bush hovered all the protecting presences of a man’s ancestors; and in this room all the spirits of those dead masks […] seemed to have concentrated. The masks and carvings looked old [but] they were all quite new. So old, so new. And out of his stupendous idea of his civilization, his stupendous idea of the future, Father Huismans saw himself at the end of it all, the last, luck witness.

They wore their uniforms the way Ferdinand had at one time worn his lycée blazer: they saw themselves both as the new men of Africa and the men of the new Africa. They made such play with the national flag and the portrait of the President—the two now always going together—that in the beginning I thought […] these new officers stood for a new, constructive pride. But they were simpler. The flag and the President’s portrait were only like their fetishes, the sources of their authority. They didn’t see, these young men, that there was anything to build in their country. As far as they were concerned, it was all there already. They had only to take. They believed that, by being what they were, they had earned the right to take; and the higher the officer, the greater the crookedness—if that word had any meaning.

Everything the President did had a reason. As a ruler in what was potentially hostile territory, he was creating an area where he and his flag were supreme. As an African, he was building a new town on the site of what had been a rich European suburb—but what he was building was meant to be grander […] He was creating modern Africa […] He was by-passing real Africa, the difficult Africa of bush and villages, and creating something that would match anything that existed in other countries. Photographs of this State Domain—and of others like it in other parts of the country—began to appear in those magazines about Africa that were published in Europe but subsidized by governments like ours…Under the rule of our new President the miracle had occurred: Africans had become modern men who built in concrete and glass and sat in cushioned chairs covered in imitation velvet. It was like a curious fulfilment of Father Huismans’s prophecy about the retreat of African Africa, and the success of the European graft.

Our ideas of men were simple; Africa was a place where we had to survive. But in the Domain it was different. There they could scoff at trade and gold, because in the magical atmosphere of the Domain, among the avenues and new houses, another Africa had been created. In the Domain Africans—the young men at the polytechnic—were romantic. They were not always present at the parties or gatherings; but the whole life of the Domain was built around them. In the town “African” could be a word of abuse or disregard; in the Domain it was a bigger word. An “African” there was a new man whom everybody was busy making, a man about to inherit—the important man that years before, at the lycée, Ferdinand had seen himself as.

I thought how far we had both come, to talk about Africa like this. We had even learned to take African magic seriously. It hadn’t been like that on the coast. But as we talked that evening about the seminar, I began to wonder whether Indar and I weren’t fooling ourselves and whether we weren’t allowing the Africa we talked about to become too different from the Africa we knew. Ferdinand didn’t want to lose touch with the spirits; he was nervous of being his own. That had been at the back of his question. We all understood his anxiety; but it was as though, at the seminar, everyone had been ashamed, or fearful, of referring to it directly. The discussion had been full of words of another kind, about religion and history. It was like that on the Domain; Africa there was a special place.

Not all the songs were like “Barbara Allen.” Some were modern, about war and injustice and oppression and nuclear destruction. But always in between there were the older, sweeter melodies. These were the ones I waited for, but in the end the voice linked the two kinds of song, linked the maidens and lovers and sad deaths of bygone times with the people of today who were oppressed and about to die. It was make-believe—I never doubted that. You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless—like the other people in that room… African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks—you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it.

“Yvette goes on about the boys’ uniforms. But that’s the army background, and the mother’s hotel background […] The boys in the Domain have to wear theirs. And it isn’t a colonial uniform—that’s the point. In fact, everybody nowadays who wears a uniform has to understand that. Everyone in uniform has to feel that he has a personal contract with the President. And try to get the boys out of that uniform. You won’t succeed […] We have all these photographs of him in African costume nowadays […] I raised the issue with him one day in the capital […] he said ‘Five years ago, Raymond, I would have agreed with you […] But times have changed. The people now have peace. They want something else. So they no longer see a photograph of a solider. They see a photograph of an African. And that isn’t a picture of me, Raymond. It is a picture of all Africans.’”

“Such a work, if adequately prepared, might well become the handbook for a true revolution throughout the continent. Always you can catch that quality of the young man’s despair […] Always you have that feeling that the damage can never perhaps be undone. Always there is that note, for those with the ears to hear it, of the young man grieving for the humiliations of his mother, the hotel maid […] I don’t think people know that earlier this year he and his entire government made a pilgrimage to the village of that woman of Africa […] Can you imagine the humiliations of an African hotel maid in colonial times? No amount of piety can make up for that. But piety is all we have to offer.” “Or we can forget,” Indar said. “We can trample the past.” Raymond said, “That is what most of the leaders of Africa do. They want to build skyscrapers in the bush. This man wants to build a shrine.”

“Raymond tells a story well […] What he says about the President and ideas is certainly true. The President uses them all and somehow makes them work together. He is the great African chief, and he is also the man of the people. He is the modernizer and he is also the African who has rediscovered his African soul. He’s conservative, revolutionary, everything. He’s going back to the old ways, and he’s also the man who’s going ahead […] the mish-mash works because he keeps on changing, unlike the other guys. He is the soldier who decided to become an old-fashioned chief, and he’s the chief whose mother was a hotel maid. That makes him everything, and he plays up everything. There isn’t anyone in the country who hasn’t heard of that hotel maid mother.”

“I began to understand at the same time that my anguish about being a man adrift was false, that for me that dream of home and security was nothing more than a dream of isolation, anachronistic and stupid and very feeble. I belonged to myself alone. I was going to surrender my manhood to nobody. For someone like me there was only one civilization and one place—London, or a place like it. Every other kind of life was make believe. Home—what for? To hide? To bow to our great men? For people in our situation, people led into slavery, that is the biggest trap of all. We have nothing. We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves. ‘Here, take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater man yourself, for my sake!’ No! I want to be a man myself.”

But you couldn’t forget where you were. The photograph of the President was about three feet high. The official portraits of the President in African garb were getting bigger and bigger, the quality of the prints finer (they were said to be done in Europe). And once you knew about the meaning of the leopard skin and the symbolism of what was carved on the stick, you were affected; you couldn’t help it. We had all become his people; even here at the Tivoli we were reminded that we all in various ways depended on him

A race riot in the capital in the 1930s—that ought to have been a strong story […] hysteria and terror in the African cités. But Raymond wasn’t interested in that side. He didn’t give the impression that he had talked to any of the people involved […] He stuck with the newspapers; he seemed to want to show that he had read them all and had worked out the precise political shade of each. His subject was an event in Africa, but he might have been writing about Europe or a place he had never been. His article about the missionaries and the ransomed slaves was also full of quotations, not from newspapers, but from the mission’s archives in Europe. The subject wasn’t new to me. At school on the coast we were taught about European expansion as though it had been no more than a defeat of the Arabs and their slave trading ways. We thought of that as English-school stuff; we didn’t mind. History was something dead and gone […] and we didn’t pay too much attention to it.

I didn’t know where I could go on to. I didn’t think—after what I had seen of Indar and other people in the Domain—that I had the talent or the skills to survive in another country […] My panic grew, and my guilt, and my feeling that I was provoking my own destruction […] I began to question myself. Was I possessed by Yvette? Or was I—like Mahesh […] possessed by myself, the man I thought I was with Yvette? [...] She gave me the idea of my manliness I had grown to need. Wasn’t my attachment to her an attachment to that idea? And oddly involved with this idea of myself, and myself and Yvette, was the town itself—the flat, the house in the Domain, the way both our lives were arranged, the absence of a community, the isolation in which we both lived.

The speech, so far, was like many others the President had made. The themes were not new: sacrifice and the bright future; the dignity of the woman of Africa; the need to strengthen the revolution […] the need for Africans to be African […] to rediscover the virtues of the diet and medicines of their grandfather and not to go running like children after things in imported tins and bottles; the need for vigilance, work and, above all, discipline. This was how, while appearing just to restate old principles, the President also acknowledged and ridiculed new criticism […] He always acknowledged criticism, and he often anticipated it. He made everything fit; he could suggest that he knew everything. He could make it appear that everything that was happening in the country, good bad or ordinary, was part of a bigger plan.

THE ANCESTORS Shriek. Many false gods have come to this land, but none have been as false as the gods of today. The cult of the woman of Africa kills all our mothers, and since war is an extension of politics we have decided to face the ENEMY with armed confrontation […] By ENEMY we mean the powers of imperialism, the multi-nationals and the puppet powers that be, the false gods, the capitalists, the priests and teachers who give false interpretations. The laws encourage crime […] the schools teach ignorance […] we of the LIBERATION ARMY have received no education. We do not print books and make speeches. We only know the TRUTH, and we acknowledge this land as the land of the people whose ancestors now shriek over it.

She didn’t see the photograph as a photograph; she didn’t interpret distance and perspective. She was concerned with the actual space occupied in the printed picture by different figures […] only the visiting foreigners were given equal space with the President. With local people the President was always presented as a towering figure… “He is killing those men, Salim. They are screaming inside, and he knows they’re screaming. And you know, Salim, that isn’t a fetish he’s got there. It’s nothing… that’s nothing… He’s got a man, and this man goes ahead of him wherever he goes. This man jumps out of the car before the car stops and everything that is bad for the President follows this man and leaves the President free… The man who jumps out and gets lost in the crowd is white.”

Their obsession was with more than a skin blemish. They had cut themselves off. Once they were supported by their idea of their high traditions […] now they were empty in Africa, and unprotected, with nothing to fall back on. They had begun to rot. I was like them. Unless I acted now, my fate would be like theirs. That constant questioning of mirrors and eyes; compelling others to look for the blemish that kept you in hiding; lunacy in a small room. I decided to rejoin the world […] I wrote to Nazruddin that I was coming to London […] When no other choice was left to me, when family and community hardly existed, when duty hardly had a meaning, and there were no safe houses.

Of this Europe I could form no mental picture. But it was there in London; it couldn’t be missed; and there was no mystery. The effect of those little stalls, booths, kiosks and choked grocery shops—run by people like myself—was indeed of people who had squashed themselves in. They traded in the middle of London as they had traded in the middle of Africa […] In the streets of London I saw these people, who were like myself, as from a distance. I saw the young girls selling packets of cigarettes at midnight, seemingly imprisoned in their kiosks, like puppets in a puppet theatre. They were cut off from the life of the great city where they had come to live, and I wondered about the pointlessness of their own hard life, the pointlessness of their difficult journey.

“What place is there in the world for people like that? There are so many of them… What happens to these people? Where do they go? How do they live? Do they go back home? Do they have homes to go back to? You’ve talked a lot, Salim, about those girls from East Africa in the tobacco kiosks, selling cigarettes at all hours of the night… You say they don’t have a future and that they don’t even know where they are. I wonder whether that isn’t their luck. They expect to be bored, to do what they do. The people I’ve been talking about have expectations and they know they’re lost in London… The area is full of them, coming to the centre because it is all they know about and because they think it’s smart, and trying to make something out of nothing. You can’t blame them. They’re doing what they see the big people doing.”

That illumination I held on to, about the unity of experience and the illusion of pain, was part of the same way of feeling. We fell into it—people like Indar and myself—because it was the basis of our old way of life. But I had rejected that way of life—and just in time. In spite of the girls in the cigarette kiosks, that way of life no longer existed, in London or Africa. There could be no going back; there was nothing to go back to. We had to become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed. The younger Indar was wiser. Use the airplane; trample on the past, as Indar had said he had trampled on the past. Get rid of that idea of the past; make the dream-like scene of loss ordinary.