A Kind of Homecoming Page 6

  The lady had less bother. She had kept a careful reckoning of each day’s spending and knew within a few francs how much she should pay, and had the amount required. Smart woman. It was with her help and excellent French that I finally reached an agreement with the clerk on the matter. I had a few francs left, enough for some coffee and invited her to join me.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said when we were seated at a small table in the lounge.

  “Oh, it was nothing,” she replied. “Which part of Africa are you from?”

  “Not from Africa. The West Indies, via the U.S.A., Britain and more recently Paris.”

  “Oh!” Her face lit up. “And how is Paris? I’m longing to get back. I was born in Paris, you know.”

  That surprised me. Everything about her said England. The well-polished, sensible, low-heeled brogue shoes, the simply-cut two-piece suit of cream Shantung, the neat, sensible coiffure, the round, slightly florid face, unwrinkled except for the nest of laughter lines around the eyes, which were of a clear grey, flecked with gold-brown tints. She wore no jewellery except for a thin wedding ring of whitish metal.

  “You sound very English,” I remarked.

  “I’ve lived for seventeen years in New Zealand with my husband,” she replied. “He’s a university lecturer, or rather, he was. Now he works for UNESCO as a consultant in education. He’s here to take a look at conditions in order to advise his organization on projects they hope to set up.”

  “Is your husband a New Zealander?”

  “No, he’s French.”

  “This your first trip here, to Africa?”

  “No.” I liked the sound of her voice, so warm and controlled. “We’ve been in the Sudan, and in the Cameroons, and in the Congo just before the trouble began.”

  “May I ask what you think of the progress of independence in Africa?” This would be very interesting for me, to hear another point of view.

  “Everything depends on how one sees independence, and how one sees the African,” she began, her fingers toying with the neat pleats of her skirt in their continuous quest for orderly alignment. “Independence is nothing new or startling. The world has lived with it from time immemorial. History is full of it, but too often we ignore the lessons contained in historical events. From the moment that a country is occupied or controlled by an invading force, or stranger group, peacefully or by might of arms, the process of independence is generated among those so occupied or invaded or annexed, call it what you will. It might take years, even centuries, but always there exists the need to be free of the occupier or invader. This has nothing to do with the type of government imposed or the degree of fraternization or integration between the indigenous and the occupiers, or the extent to which the indigenous ones seem to accept the new standards of education, housing, clothing, etc. It is merely that people, all people, have a natural inclination to freedom and are prone to express this inclination, sometimes in spite of what seems to be in their best interests.

  “Every country now called developed has at some time or other experienced this compulsive need for independence, either as occupied or occupier, but we all seem loath to or incapable of appreciating it when we experience it among Africans. We expect that they will follow the pattern we design for ‘occupied’ people, until we decide to evacuate the territory or relinquish control of it, and we cannot understand or accept that they should be, as we in our turn were, unwilling to wait. Like every fever, independence develops towards a critical point, critical for the occupiers as well as for the occupied. It could end in death, as we saw in the Congo situation, or there might be a reprieve for those who, for one reason or another, were unable to find a cure, a solution, before the point of crisis.”

  This woman spoke with feeling, as if she had lived very close to people in trouble and sympathized through a deep understanding.

  “Strangely enough, as a Frenchwoman I am proud of every act perpetrated by my people in France against the occupying Germans. Had I been there, I too would have sabotaged and killed and done anything else which would have inconvenienced them. Nowadays there are Germans in business in Paris and no one hates or bothers them because the relationship is different. So it is with Africans. They want to be free, but we refuse to see it as springing from the same needs as our own, and we resist it until the point of crisis arrives. Ah! There he is.”

  Standing near the desk and looking searchingly about him was a short, thick-set man; his square, suntanned face and crew-cut grey hair seemed to belong to the typical athletic coach rather than to the intellectual his wife had mentioned. Catching sight of her he approached in quick, short, bouncy strides. I stood up to meet him. He bent down to kiss his wife, then extended his hand to me.

  “I’m Pierre Bissele. I see you’ve met my wife.”

  His English had a slight drawl which betrayed his New Zealand association. We shook hands.

  “My name is Braithwaite,” I replied. “Your wife and I have met, although we had not got around to introducing ourselves. Delighted to meet you, Madame Bissele,” I said, bowing to her. She laughed happily at the slightly ridiculous situation.

  “We were on to my hobby-horse,” she told him. “African independence.”

  “Oh, that,” he smiled, showing strong, square teeth. “That’s become a universal hobby-horse, because most people don’t understand it, including my wife.” He spoke soothingly, as one who had heard it all before and was prepared to be indulgent.

  “This is one of our more familiar points of separate departure,” she said to me, her tone easily matching her husband’s for sweet patience; “in opposite directions. My husband believes that Africans should be trained, prepared for independence; whereas, I believe they should be helped towards responsible government. The two things are not the same, although they are interdependent. My husband believes that you can teach people to be independent. I disagree, because I believe that people are naturally disposed to independence, although it is true that sometimes it is possible to subject them to conditions which humiliate to the point of demoralizing and killing every last vestige of independence of spirit.”

  “Don’t misquote me, chérie,” he interposed. “I admit to part of your observation, but with reservations. The African may wish independence, but he has to be taught how to use it, otherwise the ugly situation in the Congo would reproduce itself all over the place. That is a classic example of people who become independent without any idea of the meaning of it.”

  “No, darling,” she insisted. “All that is classical about the Congo situation is the failure of certain people to appreciate the essential drives and aspirations of others until the point of crisis was reached and passed.”

  “Mr. Braithwaite,” he addressed me, “you as an African might find my remarks difficult to accept, but it would seem that my wife has already been speaking quite frankly to you, so another voice should not be too hard to bear. You and your people have got to realize that established institutions and countries were not created overnight; some of them took centuries to build, yet you seem to think that all you need to do is say ‘This land is mine’ and you will be able to take effective control where the European with all his advancement to back him up has not made much headway. You all want to run before you can even crawl. Everything must happen today, or even yesterday. No thought, no planning, because there is no experience to guide you. I see it every day in my particular field, education. Look at these new African States. They all want universities on the one hand and compulsory primary education on the other; but there’s nothing in between to keep the balance. And when I tell them that before they can embark on any programme of compulsory education they must develop a system of secondary education and give it time to develop, they react as if I’m trying to sabotage their plans. But I know what’s behind it; build a university to impress the other African States and introduce compulsory education to impress the voters, and the d
evil take the hindmost.”

  He wasn’t so cool and detached now; this was his piece of the hobby-horse and he was bouncing about in the saddle, and, to my mind, not very coherently.

  “Your wife made the point earlier,” I said, “that the compulsive urge to independence should be recognized and encouraged, and the people helped to understand and cope with the problems of government while there exists a state of harmony which favours such action. I am inclined to agree with her, especially as it is true to say that no new state in Africa became independent without reaching a point in the relationship between the colonial power and the local people when a measure of tension had developed.”

  “What my wife sometimes fails to consider,” he said, “is the near impossibility of understanding the African mind. He does not react to circumstances in the same way as the European, nor does he . . . ”

  “Oh, what rot, Pierre,” she said, with some heat. “What’s all this talk about the African mind after all these years of European influence. Do you imagine that Africans are such supermen that they have remained unaffected by close contact with the British and the Germans and Dutch and French and God knows what! Your difficulty is that you see a situation as a Frenchman and you fondly imagine that your view is peculiar and special to you, or maybe only to Frenchmen. When an African speaks French, do you suppose that he is merely a kind of gramophone reproducing words? No, he is also expressing sense, overtones, nuances, all of which is possible only because something inside him has become identified with the words, and for ever more that will be a part of himself, and he is therefore never again only African. The same thing is true of English-speaking or Spanish-speaking or any other Africans. And all these indefinable things play their part in this drive towards independence. So when you resist, you are resisting the African plus; and when you co-operate, you are co-operating with something besides the African, something akin to yourself.”

  As she spoke, she became calmer, assured in the rightness of her thinking, and I felt a deep sympathy with her.

  “Do you think any African leader would agree with that?” he asked.

  “Why should he, when we find it so hard to believe?” she replied. “Maybe it is because we recognize so much of ourselves in them that we resist so strongly. Maybe we fear ourselves, especially that part of ourselves reflected in them.”

  “Just for the record,” I offered, “I’m not an African. I’m from the West Indies.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Does that make any difference?” she inquired.

  “Not really,” I agreed. “No difference at all.”

  “Of course it doesn’t. A black American behaves and thinks as an American, and a black West Indian’s behaviour is, I am sure, as British as British, no matter what anyone says. The trouble with us white ones is that we cannot forget we once owned or ruled ‘blacks’, so we think of the black American as a ‘black’ rather than as an American, and the African as a ‘black’ rather than as an African. We see the blackness and our whole attitude to them is coloured by that. We have not yet learned that when they look out on the world and at themselves they see people, that’s all, and they cannot abide the knowledge that we see them as something less, because, let’s be honest about it, if we don’t treat them as people, you know, as we see ourselves, then we treat them as something else, something lesser; and what’s lesser than people? Animals! That’s the crux of it. But I do believe, inside here,” she touched her chest, “that the day we see the black people as just people, that day we will discover what respect means, and there will be no need for talk of tolerance and things like that, and it will surely follow that they will know it, and their whole attitude to us will immediately undergo a change—for the better.”

  She leaned back in her chair, slightly flushed. She had said her piece.

  “You returning directly to the West Indies?” he asked. This was safer, easier ground.

  “No, I’m visiting a few other African countries before returning to Paris. I live there.”

  “How do you like it there? How are you treated there? I mean, in day-to-day living?”

  “I have no complaints. I like it.”

  “Are you treated decently, tolerantly?” he persisted.

  I could see the point he was after.

  “What kind of question is that?” his wife intervened. “If he is treated decently in Paris, what does that prove? Must every black man travel to Paris before he can expect decent treatment? And what’s so wonderful about it anyway? What’s so wonderful about treating a man as a man? Is that any cause for boasting? You see my point now, Pierre? When it is natural to us to see people as people, we will not need to expect any special honours for it.” Then, turning to me, she really exploded. Her voice remained low, her hands inert in her lap, but her eyes shone, and her words had the force of hammer blows. “You speak of yourself as West Indian to indicate that you are different, I suppose, from the Africans. Is that it? If you walk down the street, would anyone looking at you recognize anything about you as different? I meet Africans very often who look very much like you, if you’ll allow me,” she added this with heavy sarcasm. “If wherever you come from,” she went on, “you live and work in terms of equality with other people, you should be all the more concerned that everyone else can live and work in the same way. Your responsibility in this matter is as great as mine—not as a black man, but as a person.”

  I did not reply to her. I did not intend to separate myself from her observations on the universality of human dignity. By my reference to the country of my birth or the country in which I now lived, I was merely trying to avoid being in the false position of having the term “African” attached to me when in spite of my skin I was not an African. In my view this did not conflict with my opinions or sympathies, vis-â-vis human dignity in general and African interests in particular.

  “Don’t be too hard on our friend here,” Pierre said to her, “he might be one of those men who likes to be nice to ladies. My wife,” he said to me, “can be pretty tough when she thinks she is right. Have you arranged for transport to the airport?”

  I realized that he wanted to be rid of the discussion. “No,” I replied.

  “Then we can travel together,” he said. “I’m still using an official car, so you can ride with us to the airport. I think we’d better turn in, dear. It’s up with the birds tomorrow.”

  We stood and once again there was pleasure in her eyes.

  “Good night, my friend,” she said. “I do not apologize for speaking frankly to you. The things we have been talking about concern us all very deeply, and we do not seem to realize how terribly important they are. My husband is an educator; I was trained as a nurse. How often do we stop to think of what will happen here in Africa when both education and health are improved to the point when Africans are living longer and healthier lives and are better educated to express themselves and apprehend local, national and international affairs? If things remain as they are now, in terms of poor inter-racial relationships, we will have to deal with many more Africans who will not only hate us, but be able to express their hatred in the same glib, sugar-coated way in which we often do.

  “In short, there will be more of them and they will call the tune. Very soon we might discover that a white skin is a severe disadvantage in many parts of the world unless we work very hard to show that we, all of us, set great store by the man in the skin, not on the skin itself. Good night, and we’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  They walked away towards the stairs, arm in arm, and I looked on in some wonderment at those two persons who entertained so high a regard for each other that they were not swamped by each other, or afraid to express opinions for fear of being misunderstood. It seemed to me that if the same spirit should operate more widely between people that truth and dignity would not be subject to the dubious advantage of maintaining accord. Being with them had bee
n exciting and stimulating, so much so that I felt no need to retire to bed and went out to walk around for my last look at Conakry. The taxis were gone, the main street deserted except for a lonely-looking dog which dragged itself lethargically along the centre of the road.

  There was the brightness of starlight, no moon, just a clearness which showed the road a straight, broad cut-out between the deep blackness of shadow from the huge trees on both sides. Brighter in the centre of town, where the trees gave place to the tall church spire and the ministries. Dark night and stillness, with somewhere near a rustling of living things, trees maybe, or restless birds, or people breathing deep in sleep.

  I thought, “So this is Africa, and these trees were here a long, long time. It must take many, many years to make such big trees, and maybe, in the long ago, someone walked here, or slept here and loved here to start or continue the sequence which involved me, produced me. Perhaps. Where are they now, the ones dead and silent so long? If I stand still will I feel anything of them? Where I stand now, did any of my forebears pass here, either freely or bound for the beach and the boats of the traders? All you witch-doctors and diviners in which my fathers and their fathers believed, where are you now; can you see that the son who left has returned in the son of his son’s son?” I wished that I knew something of my origin to give me the right to say, “In such and such a place my father’s people stood and fought. . . . ” But perhaps I am lucky in that I have no known point of origin; all Africa is therefore my original home, and I am at liberty to take my choice. Madame Bissele’s words came to my mind: “from the moment a country is occupied or controlled by an invader force or stranger group, as from that moment the process of independence is generated.” What she probably meant was that the consciousness of independence was generated—that is, if one believed that all men are born with the right to freedom.