A Kind of Homecoming Page 9

  “Oh, why did he do that?”

  “Medical opinion. He’s a doctor. But the Old Man fooled him. You see, he too is a doctor.” He grinned mischievously. “In this game you’ve got to do more than wish.”

  We circulated and he introduced me to several government officials and their wives, among them two ministers, one of whom was a slim young man who wore a filmy silk poncho over his European clothes and a fez. We chatted with him and his wife for a minute or so, when he looked at his wrist-watch, murmured something about being late for something or other and led his wife away.

  My friend laughed. “You’re very fortunate,” he said. “He allowed you all of a minute of his precious time. Usually you can figure on him checking his watch after standing still for a few seconds. Always on the run, that one, mostly from himself, because nobody’s chasing that I can see. But he’s smart enough to run in the right direction, so far.”

  “Don’t you like him?”

  “Who me? Friend, I like everybody.” His voice was sweet as honey.

  I met the State representatives of Liberia and Nigeria, and their wives, and representatives of the International Co-operation Administration, together with local personalities. One young newspaperman asked if I was the author of To Sir, With Love, and on my admitting it, said he would like to interview me for his newspaper. I agreed and we arranged to lunch together the following day. There were several Britons present, officials of one sort or another who seemed to be on terms of easy relaxed camaraderie with the Africans. “This bodes well for post-independence relationships,” I thought.

  It was altogether a very pleasant affair, but it required a real effort of will to remember that I was in Africa and not at some cocktail party in Europe. Only very few of the Africans wore national dress; most of them favoured English worsteds and tweeds and succeeded in looking even more formal than the British. Around seven-thirty people began to drift away and I invited my friend to dine with me at the hotel.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I must break my fast with the family. Some other time.” I then realized that I had not seen him take a drink during the evening. We agreed to meet late the following afternoon, and he left me.

  Dinner was very much in the British tradition: whispered conversation, subdued laughter and servants hurrying on near-silent feet. The servants in the dining-room seemed to be of two categories, i.e., those who waited at tables and were obviously illiterate, having much difficulty in either understanding what was said to them or in making themselves understood, and those who supervised them. These latter were literate and wore red cummerbunds to distinguish them from their lowlier brethren; over both these groups was a major-domo, a courteous, intelligent young man far removed from the sickening obsequiousness in which the others indulged. Perhaps I am not as liberal and objective as I would like to be, but I must confess to feeling an acute irritation every time I saw one of these young men bowing so servilely to the guests, halfway to touching the ground. What the hell kind of preparation was this for independence, or hadn’t these young men heard about it? Would they continue to do this after April 27, or would they suddenly stop, in mid-obeisance, so to speak, when the guns roared and the bells pealed the good news? Would it be good news to them? Did they know anything about it?

  After dinner I took a short walk around the environs of the hotel. It was cool now and people were sitting in doorways, chatting and laughing together, while small children played noisy games in the dusty street when, in my opinion, they should long ago have been in bed. Try as I might, I just could not get the feeling that something important loomed ahead for this country, for these people. I was very surprised and somewhat disappointed.

  The newspaper reporter arrived on time next day and I suggested lunch.

  “Fine,” he said, “but not here. I can’t stand this place, with its stiff atmosphere and bowing flunkeys and sky-high prices. I’d rather eat somewhere else.”

  “Is there somewhere else?”

  “We could try the City Hotel, a short walk down the road, or we could drive out to the Government rest house on the edge of town, but I’d recommend the City Hotel. Lots of atmosphere; everybody goes there sooner or later. It used to be the hotel before this one was built. Part of its fame derives from the fact that Graham Greene lived there while writing The Heart of the Matter.”

  “Sold,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  He was right about the “short walk”—but I couldn’t be sure about the atmosphere. I saw a large wooden three-storied building very much in colonial-American style, with double-entrance stairways and railed portico. It had once been painted white, a long time ago, but had finally given up the unequal struggle against daily layers of red dust. In one corner of the portico an African peddler had spread his wide collection of curios: tanned snake skins, handmade sandals, beads, carved heads in gleaming ivory or ebony, crudely made handbags of crocodile or alligator hide; a miscellany slightly different from that for which his ancestors had sold their land or their brethren into slavery. The wheel had certainly turned round.

  The lounge of the hotel was cool, unpretentious and comfortable. Yes, comfortable, not in its furnishings, for these were simple contrived wooden arrangements; but in the immediate welcome which the room itself seemed to extend, as well as the hearty heavily inflected “Hi, fellers” which the owner shouted from his perch behind the bar. And here, for the first time I saw black and white men and women sitting, drinking and chatting in the friendliest and most relaxed terms. I guessed that this was what my companion meant by “atmosphere”.

  A waiter waddled over to take our order. No other term could effectively describe his odd, splay-footed gait and the way he swung his arms, as if to help propel himself forward. A loose-limbed, ugly fellow with the cheeriest of smiles, he seemed to know and be on very personal terms with everyone, and either greeted them by name or with the word “boss”, which he used indiscriminately to man and woman alike. We ordered ham sandwiches and beer.

  “Well, Mr. Braithwaite,” my companion began, “what do you think of Freetown?”

  “Is this the interview?” I asked.

  “Yes, part of it.”

  “I don’t know what to think of Freetown yet,” I replied. “I’ve seen very little of it in physical terms, but the thing I want most to see is either very elusive or non-existent.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Attitude, feeling, atmosphere, call it what you like, a sort of general air of anticipation of independence. I expected it to be the chief talking point on everyone’s lips, the major topic of news, but so far I’ve been unable to hear anything, feel anything.”

  “Things are happening, though,” he said.

  “I’m sure they are. I’ve seen a nice piece of road being built from the Governor’s house to the cotton tree, all of a hundred yards or so, and I’ve seen some bright-painted flagpoles, and some fairy lights in trees, so I’m sure things are happening. But what about the people, what’s happening with them?”

  “You mean you expect to see us excited?”

  “Frankly, yes. I’d be very excited if British Guiana were to become independent in a few days, I can assure you.”

  “You must understand, we in Sierra Leone are a very reserved people; we take things very calmly, no matter what it is. It would take a lot more than independence to make us fly off the handle.”

  He was serious about it, too. Young, relaxed and neatly turned out, his young face sporting the newest of beards, he was probably stating what he believed. Good God! This African was telling about being reserved about something which was a battle-cry throughout the world, and has always been the prod excelsior wherever man has struggled against indignity and enslavement. He said it with the same casual pride with which the British often defend their insularity: they too claim to be reserved. Reserved for what? What was this fellow talking about?

  “Extraordinary.�
�� I could think of nothing else to say to him.

  “Not really. We can jump around and dance and wave our arms as energetically as anyone else, but what’s to be gained by it? If you’re here on Independence Day you will no doubt see that we can enjoy ourselves very enthusiastically. Then you’ll see all the fever and spirit and atmosphere you want.”

  We were not on the same wave-length. Or perhaps he was deliberately evading the issue. Damn it, one would expect the people to sing and dance on The Day, as they would at Christmas or Easter or any major local feast day. I was talking about a consciousness of arrival, of achievement, of national and political stature, of meaningful identity in which there was popular involvement. I was talking about a death and a birth: death of colonial control and everything the term indicated; and the birth of a new entity, a new State. I thought that these things should be more than enough to generate excitement and fever among these people, as they have generated excitement and fever among people throughout history. What was so special about Sierra Leoneans that they were immune to this fever? Had they become so deeply colonized as to be completely emasculated politically?

  “Here in Sierra Leone we have established a tradition,” he was saying, “of restraint in all things, and that tradition will be fully vindicated in the next few weeks and afterwards. There is no possibility of the sort of breakdown which happened in the Congo when they got their independence.”

  “My friend, I’m not even thinking of that kind of thing,” I told him. “Aren’t you personally excited at the thought that your country’s independence is imminent? I’m not hoping for or expecting any unpleasant occurrences; I’m merely surprised at the almost complete absence of interest in what should now be a popular preoccupation.” I wondered who was interviewing whom.

  “What did you think of the P.M. last night?” he asked. A neat change of subject.

  “He seems rather old,” I said. “Rather surprising. What sort of government does he head?”

  “Our Government is based very much on the British parliamentary system,” he replied.

  “Who leads the opposition?”

  That seemed to stop him in his tracks.

  “Well, at the moment there is no real opposition,” he replied, “because we need unified effort to see us through the first stages of independence. Later, perhaps.”

  Where had I heard this sort of thing before? Oh, yes! My friend in Guinea had hinted that the opposition in Sierra Leone had been somehow invalidated.

  “Are there enough trained Sierra Leoneans to run the country efficiently after independence?” I asked.

  “Not enough, but for some years now we have been gradually replacing overseas personnel with local people, and I expect that this process will continue for some time yet.”

  This was a lousy interview, or whatever it was. He was not asking me any questions of interest to me, and I could get nothing more than very general and vague comments out of him, so gradually the conversation drifted round to more earthy things. He pointed out some of the clientele sitting around like ourselves over beer and sandwiches: the consul-generals of the United States and Liberia, a diplomat from Yugoslavia, the French consul-general, a magistrate, a few good-looking girls, whom he referred to as “good company”.

  “They prefer to eat sandwiches here than dine at the Paramount,” he said. “Here everybody is friends with everybody. Drop in any Saturday afternoon around four and you will see about everybody who is anybody. They all come in here for a while.”

  We parted shortly after two o’clock and I returned to my hotel for a nap.

  Mr. Lindsay called for me soon after five. We sat in my room in air-conditioned comfort.

  “How did it go, your chat with our newspaper friend?”

  “It didn’t, except for one thing: I discovered that you are a reserved people.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You are immune to the excitements of independence fever.”

  “That’s what he said?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s creole talk.”

  “Is he a creole?”

  “Sure.”

  “And you?”

  “I come from the hinterland, or protectorate. The creoles refer to us as aborigines.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “These creoles are the descendants of the emancipated slaves who first settled the coastal strip, which later became the colony of Sierra Leone; it extends inland a little way beyond Freetown. The rest of the country is protectorate, peopled and owned by indigenous tribes. From the beginning the settlers looked down their noses at us, and considered us uncultured savages. With their advantages of education and other evidences of contact with Europeans, they isolated themselves from us and only within very recent times have we been able to have any voice in the country’s affairs. But things are changing. Since the last elections we are in the majority in the House of Representatives.” His voice was low and earnest. “The Old Man is an aborigine. He was educated at Bo then went to study medicine in Britain. Do you know that when he returned to Sierra Leone, a qualified practitioner, he could not practise in Freetown? The creoles would have nothing to do with him, considered him an aborigine and socially inferior to them. So he returned to the hinterland and worked among his people, then later turned to politics. Now that the tide of affairs has turned, he has the support of all the Paramount chiefs, and none of the creoles are big enough to unseat him.”

  “But I can see no difference, physically, between you and the newspaperman. How would I know who is or is not a creole?”

  “It’s not important that you know,” he replied, “but it is easy for us to distinguish them.”

  “What’s your feeling about this ‘reserve’ he spoke about? Are the aborigines equally reserved about independence?”

  “Speaking for myself, I would like to say that it’s a lot of crap.” He spat out the word with nose-wrinkling distaste. “It’s merely an excuse for lack of popular interest in the whole thing. Let’s put it this way—an outsider might form the view that the whole independence idea has been a sort of political arrangement between Britain and the Government of Sierra Leone, and that at no point have the people been consulted or taken into our leaders’ confidence, and he might assume that independence has not come to us as a result of popular pressure or agitation, and therefore there is no real popular involvement. Furthermore he might form the view that the Government has so effectively silenced any opposing voice, that no one can express criticism of its actions.”

  “And would such an observer be accurate in his deductions?” Two of us could play at this game.

  “I’m in no position to say,” he replied, “but as you move around you’ll have a chance to see things for yourself.”

  “Good, when do we start?”

  “How about tomorrow, Saturday? There’s to be a function up-country at a place called Moyamba, about ninety miles or so from Freetown. Crowning of the local beauty queen, should be interesting for you to see how we indigenes live. In any case you’ll see something of the country.”

  “O.K. It’s a date.”

  On Saturday we set out soon after mid-day, driving through the depressing ugliness of Freetown along the narrow macadam road, through attractive but impoverished-looking villages which bore the startling names of Waterloo, Wellington, Allentown and Newton, into the wide-open cool countryside, green and soothing with acres and acres of rolling ground devoted to the cultivation of Sierra Leone’s chief crop, palm oil. The road wound its way under the overhang of huge trees, hugged the shoulders of low hills and crossed innumerable gullies, deep or shallow, each spanned by a narrow bridge, wide enough for only a single vehicle.

  “Considering that this is your main arterial road, these bridges are frightfully narrow, aren’t they?” I asked him.

  “Not surprisingly so,” he replied, l
aughing. “When the British built this road they did not conceive of the possibility of development beyond horse and buggy traffic.”

  Songo marked the border between colony and protectorate and also the end of the surfaced highway. From then on we travelled in a swirl of dust which increased to a blinding, choking cloud whenever anything passed us in either direction. The countryside now became wilder with no sign of planned cultivation. Here and there we passed a tract of scorched earth, which my friend assured me was deliberate: the first step in seasonal cultivation. First burn the ground to get rid of as much as possible of creepers, grass and saplings, then clear away everything except tree stumps, then plant your crop in the hope that it will outgrow the new weeds and bush. Soon after harvest the same patch of ground will look as virgin as before, and remain so until next year or later.

  Sometimes the road cut through thickly wooded areas, the bushes alongside the road thickly grimed with layers of red-grey dust, then broke out into open country, wild-looking enough that elephants were conspicuously absent. About twenty miles beyond Songo the road ended at the bank of the Ribi River, wide, deep and blackly opaque, and we cooled our heels while waiting for the hand-operated ferry to take us across.

  “Part of the legacy we’ll inherit with independence,” my friend remarked. “This country is really a nest of rivers joined together by land, and there are more bridges per mile of roadway than in any other country on God’s earth. Ergo, we’ll have to build new bridges, if this country is to be economically developed. That means we’ll have to start learning how to win friends and influence people internationally. The British taught us a hell of a lot about government, now we’ll have to find somebody to help us with development.”

  “Like who, for instance?”

  “Like anybody. The United States, perhaps. Nobody can doubt that we are Western-orientated, I think that’s the term.” His easy laughter followed, and I wondered how to heed him; how much was mockery and how much was meant seriously.