Vwarda had now been a sovereign state for eleven years. It had a Negro president, a Negro cabinet and a Negro as chairman of the state bank, but anyone could see that the good jobs were still held by whites, especially jobs commanding substantial salaries. The judges of the supreme court were white, as were the appeals judges. All jobs pertaining to the economic control of the country were in the hands of men like Sir Charles Braham, who had stayed over from the colonial administration. The top general of the army was a Sandhurst man, and the well-paid pilots of the Vwarda jet were Americans. This condition prevailed far down into the hierarchy, and it was not surprising to me that the Negroes had rebelled.
In the first two days of the rioting they killed sixteen white men, burned some warehouses, and issued a series of inflammatory pronouncements. To many in Europe, it seemed as if the great African revolution, which white men feared, had started and must soon spread to neighboring countries like Tanzania, Zambia, the Congo and Swaziland, but this did not happen, and when order was restored my directors ordered me to Vwarda to report on the status of our investments.
When my plane crossed the high swamp in which the Vwarda River found its origin, I felt that I was back in a country of which I was a citizen, for I had worked in its forests so long that I seemed a part of them, and the dark faces that had recently burned and killed were the faces of my brothers. When we landed at the capital I saw the same trees covered with late flowers, the same broad avenues lined by Victorian houses which had once been populated with Englishmen and their finicky wives, the same corrugated-iron shacks that had both depressed and exhilarated me when I first saw them. It was a fine African city, destined to become finer with each passing year as the shacks were replaced by stucco houses. In some ways it was the most primitive of the Negro capitals; in others it was the most representative, for it was a city in growth, a land where a once depressed people made its bid for self-government.
When I arrived, Sir Charles, as I might have guessed, was deep in the jungle inspecting the area where most of the killings had occurred. In his black suit, his tie carefully knotted and tight about his sweating throat, he was plodding along jungle trails, assuring the local chieftains that there was no cause for fear. He, for one, was not alarmed and the great dam to the north was proceeding as usual. ‘None of the European engineers have fled,’ he told me on the radio, ‘because things must go forward. There has been trouble. There have been regrettable assassinations, but all countries have hotheads, and Vwarda will know how to handle ours, won’t we?’ In that difficult period following the riots, Sir Charles was the typical English colonial servant doing his best to quieten things down. ‘We don’t want a revolution on our hands, do we?’ he told the jungle chiefs. ‘Mettra fect, who would be hurt by such folly? Your sons, not mine, and we don’t want that, do we?’
From the capital I reported to my superiors in Geneva: ‘The recent events have been termed riots. I would call them a rampage, a blind senseless rampage which has subsided as quickly as it started. In this district the disaffected Negroes made three demands—Negro judges immediately, the nationalization of the diamond diggings, and Negro pilots to fly the Vwarda plane. The government has agreed to do something, and quickly, about the first two demands, but the third has its comic aspects and will be forgotten. When the Negro agitators captured the airport, they surrounded the Boeing jet that was loading for its flight to New York and shouted, “Reginald Huygere must fly it! Reginald Huygere to the controls!” Huygere, a bright young fellow who has had about fifty hours of ground training from the Pan American instructors and who barely knows the fuel system, let alone the controls, stuck his head out the cockpit window and shouted. “Who, me?” And everyone broke up into laughter and the plane took off as scheduled.
‘I know you want my harshest appraisal of the riots. They were inevitable. They were justified. They were unimportant. At periodic intervals during the next two decades they will be repeated. And nothing very bad will grow out of them. I judge Vwarda to be where Mexico was in the period from 1910 through 1927, and you well know what a stable country developed out of that revolution. As to the dam, every man and woman in Vwarda knows the nation needs it, and if the sensible elements of the government appeal to us tomorrow for the additional eighteen million dollars, which I figure they need, give it to them. It’s as safe here as it would be in Detroit.’
In the days when I was composing this report I saw a good deal of Monica, who was now seventeen. She had had, so far as my records showed, three lovers: the chocolate salesman, Mr. Dankerly the music teacher, and the South African football player. Yet she gave the impression of an unspoiled young woman; her dark charm was extraordinary and her capacity to use other people to her advantage uncanny. Looking at her in her father’s house, I concluded that it would have been ridiculous for a child as knowing as this to have been kept in a girls’ school. She was at least ready for university, and she knew it.
As I talked with her, she showed for the first time a deep disrespect for her father. ‘Old Tremble-chin,’ she called him, because of the uncontrollable trembling that overtook the lower part of his face during any crisis. ‘Old Tremble-chin is out in the jungle, playing the role of British raj. “Chin up, boys,” he’s saying, while his own chin shakes like a woman’s.’
‘Your father’s a courageous man,’ I protested.
‘Courageous and stupid,’ she said.
‘He spent a lot of his time bringing you up.’
‘And look at the result.’
Her bitterness was so unexpected that I suggested, ‘You feel the guilt of having busted out of school and you’re throwing it onto your father.’
‘Not at all,’ she corrected, lighting a cigarette. ‘I’m appalled at the prospect of my dear father, about to be heaved out of Vwarda, doing all sorts of contemptible little things to preserve his position. He’d do anything to hold on … another year … another month.’
‘This has been your father’s life. It’s natural for him …’
Savagely she pointed with her cigarette to a statue that stood on the front lawn. ‘Lord Carrington Braham, my grandfather. One of these nights the Negro radicals will come along this street and knock the old man off his pedestal. They should. We ought to get out now, but Father insists upon holding on. Can’t you see … he lacks dignity.’
‘What would you do … after a lifetime of service to a nation that still needs you?’
‘I know exactly what I’d do. I’d put on my full uniform, all my medals, all the reminders of my grandfather … I’ll admit the Brahams did good work here and I’m proud of it, but our day is past and to grasp at straws is degenerate.’
‘But what would you do?’ I repeated.
‘In full regalia I’d march into the office of President Hosea M’Bele, throw my contract on his desk, and tell him, “Ram it up your ass.” ’
I am never able to control my shock at the vocabulary of young people these days and I must have blushed, for Monica wagged her finger under my nose, an act which permitted me to smell the cigarette she was smoking. ‘Is that marijuana?’ I asked.
‘Want a drag?’
‘You little fool,’ I said with considerable anger. ‘What are you trying to do? live all your life in one year?’
‘I’m tired of everything my father stands for,’ she said with a kind of languid grace. Falling into a large chair, with her lovely legs hooked over one arm, she lost her previous animosity and said reflectively, as if she were already in her sixties, ‘I’ve seen Vwarda at its best—the end of the old, the beginning of the new—and it’s time we Brahams departed. The killing was no problem. Any white man who got his head chopped off did so by sheer accident. And the burning was of little consequence. It can be rebuilt. But the death of the idea …’ She trailed off into silence, took several deep puffs of her cigarette, and said, ‘You know, Uncle George, I very nearly married the chap in South Africa. He was pleasant and we had a marvelous time in bed. You know why I d
idn’t?’
‘Because you’re only seventeen and couldn’t get a license.’
‘Because on the race issue they’re such bloody fools. They’re heading for terrible retribution, and who wants to be part of that?’ She took several deep drags on her cigarette, then concluded: ‘Father’s almost as bad, in his sweet, clumsy way. He knows it’s time to get out, but he can’t bring himself to leave.’ Then, grinding the cigarette into a tray and hiding the remains in her pocket lest her father see them when he returned, she said, ‘I’ll get out! I will not compound the idiocies of your generation.’ And she walked slowly from the room.
‘You must promise me one thing,’ Monica said in early March of 1969 as she tied her father’s tie for his climactic interview. ‘Tell him, Uncle George. He must not cringe. Father, you’re not to beg.’
‘I intend to present the case unemotionally and to abide by his decision.’
‘What I’m saying is,’ she warned, ‘don’t make an ass of yourself.’
‘Monica!’ I protested, for Sir Charles was already nervous at the prospect of what he must do and his daughter’s unfair assault made him worse.
‘I don’t want a Braham to grovel,’ she snapped. ‘And certainly not in Vwarda.’
‘I’m not going to grovel,’ Sir Charles promised. He was now dressed in his best dark suit, with one ribbon in his lapel buttonhole. It had been given him by the King for meritorious service during the war, but in spite of his finery he looked barely presentable, for March was summer in Vwarda and he was sweating about the face. His clothes did not fit properly, nor could they have, for his bulk was ill-disposed and made any jacket look too tight. Also, his bottom waggled when he walked. But his worst feature was the lower part of his face, which was already twitching with anxiety. ‘Do I look acceptable?’ he asked us hopefully.
‘You look perfectly awful,’ Monica said, and then, to our surprise, placed one of her mother’s summery hats on her dark head.
‘Where are you going?’ Sir Charles asked in a petulant voice, well aware of the answer.
‘With you,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to let you make a damned fool of yourself.’ As I was thinking that I’d like nothing better than to give her a sound spanking, she turned on me and said, ‘You’re not to lie on his behalf. State the facts and that’s that.’
‘You’re not directing this expedition,’ I said.
‘Oh, but I am! I’m the last of the Brahams in Vwarda and I shall protect Lord Carrington’s memory.’ She pointed to the statue and said, ‘Grandfather would have known how to act on such an occasion.’
The Rolls-Royce was brought to the garden gate and the three of us walked mournfully toward it: Sir Charles sweating and running with little-girl steps; Monica striding purposefully, the weight of a notable family on her shoulders; and I plugged along, a sixty-one-year-old trouble-shooter from Geneva by way of Indiana and the University of Virginia. We drove along the gracious residential roads of the capital, across the business section with its three skyscraper hotels, and on out to the edge of town where the presidential palace stood, an august Victorian edifice long occupied by the lesser sons of British noble families sent here to serve as the King’s representatives. At the entrance, where Scottish soldiers in kilts had once stood guard, two Negro soldiers saluted briskly and waved us forward. At the stately doors, where generations of Englishmen had come to sign their names in the book, proving that they considered themselves an honorable part of empire, a young Negro graduate from Cambridge greeted us and said, in polished accents, ‘President M’Bele is waiting for you,’ but when we reached the pompous Salle des Audiences, where European merchants and black natives had once cowered before the majesty of English power, the president was not visible and we stood in a pathetic little cluster waiting for him while the stucco cherubs adorning the high ceiling smiled down at our discomfort.
Finally one of the gilt doors swung open and a smallish black man in his late forties hurried into the room, extended his hand to Sir Charles, and said in Oxford English, ‘My oldest friend and counselor, welcome, welcome.’ He kissed Monica’s hand and said, ‘You are even more beautiful than my wife said. She saw you at the tennis.’ Then he took my arm, linked his with it, and led us to a more intimate corner of the great room. ‘Mr. Fairbanks, we are gratified that your superiors have seen fit to extend the loan.’
‘They did so because they want to remain associated with a prosperous country.’
‘We shall make it so.’
In appearance President M’Bele was quite undistinguished; he could have been the minister of a rural church in Virginia or the owner of a minor clothing store in Soho. He would have fitted in well in any large American city as the one Negro professor in a community college or as the political reporter for the colored newspaper. In the British government today there must have been two thousand white men who looked and acted much as he did, pecking away at jobs set them by their better-educated superiors, yet because of his education at Oxford he was, in Africa, a precious commodity and he discharged the job conferred upon him by the British when they left rather better than anyone else they could have found, and much better than any white man could have done. Like almost all the new leaders of Africa, he had been trained in law, but since both Oxford and the Sorbonne sponsored a rather broad interpretation of what law was, the Negro lawyers were at least as well qualified to govern as any other group would have been, and infinitely better than the military, who were beginning to shoot them off, one by one.
Seating himself at a large table, he spread his palms downward, leaned forward, and said, ‘I suppose you know what this meeting is about?’ He paused, and when Sir Charles nodded, the president continued: I am afraid, my dear friend, that the decision is irrevocable. There were the riots, you know. The young hotspurs insist that your job is one which our people can fill.’
At this point Monica gave her father a stern glance, warning him that she expected him to maintain his dignity. Sir Charles started well. ‘Excellency,’ he said softly, ‘I am dispensable. That’s been known since independence, hasn’t it? We’ve all known that, haven’t we. Monica?’ He appealed to his daughter for substantiation, but she stared ahead, convinced that this interview must end in disaster. She would do nothing to speed the moment.
‘But the function of the job, Your Excellency! That’s something quite different, isn’t it? Mettra fect, the function of the job is crucial to the welfare of this nation …’ He made an involved speech, repeating himself so often that I wondered at the president’s patience. Twice M’Bele cast imploring glances at Monica, as if trying to enlist her aid in silencing her father, but she ignored them. Much too late, Sir Charles ended his presentation with a plea. ‘So I am not asking preferential treatment for myself, Your Excellency, am I?’ This time the question was not supposed to be rhetorical but M’Bele treated it so, and Sir Charles ended lamely on what should have been the main thrust of his argument: ‘In five more years Thomas Watallah could well be able to discharge my duties—perhaps even in four years—but certainly not now, Your Excellency.’
Now the president had to speak, and in the mellifluous cadences of his poetic people, overlaid with the best accents England had to offer he recalled his debt to Sir Charles, and I judged that he did so in order to prevent Sir Charles from reciting these facts: ‘My dearest and oldest friend, you of all white men must know how deeply indebted I am. I recall, Sir Charles when I was a child fresh out of the jungle I came here to the capital to find it occupied by white men, hostile for the most part, and it was you and your dear wife Emily who educated me, gave me a vision of what a university was like in England, convinced me that I might even qualify for Oxford. You gave my brother a job in your family and kept him there for eighteen years. He told me what an inspiration you were. This young lady should know. My brother was her father when you were absent in the jungle. Sir Charles, if you came here this morning to remind me that I owed my present position to you, I would be the f
irst to acknowledge that debt. Would to God that all white-black relationships had been as fruitful.’
I was dismayed when I saw Sir Charles wipe a tear from his left eye and swipe futilely at a second which ran down his far right cheek. His chin was beginning to tremble, and I thought: This whole thing is going to fall apart.
The president, hoping to avoid what I feared, reasoned: ‘But the forces of history in Congo Africa cannot be stayed. Sir Charles, you must know better than I that in the cities I am beset by radical intellectuals who insist that the top jobs be given to blacks. In the bush I am threatened by the tribesmen who want their members given important positions. In the interests of humanity the white judges must be retained for another ten years. In the interests of national security the two Irish generals must be held onto. So what’s left? Jobs like yours which must be transferred quickly to black control … to forestall revolution. It’s as simple as that, Sir Charles.’ He bowed his head, pressed his palms even more firmly against the table, and muttered, ‘It’s as simple as that old friend.’
Sir Charles allowed not one second of silence, pouncing upon the president’s argument and turning it to his own advantage: ‘That’s precisely what I am talking about, Your Excellency! I too am afraid of revolution! If the economic measures which I’ve started are not carried …’
‘Father,’ This harsh, commanding word, uttered by a girl, filled the Salle des Audiences and brought the interview down to fundamentals.
‘I promised Monica I’d control myself, Your Excellency, and I shall. But truthfully, Vwarda is my home. For twenty-one years it’s been my whole life.’ He laughed nervously, his chin twitching insecurely, and made a little joke which pleased him: ‘Twenty-one years! I’ve reached my maturity here. I’m old enough to vote.’