A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [24]
He said to me one day, “Salim, what do you think of the future of Africa?”
I didn’t say; I wanted to know what he thought. I wondered whether, in spite of his mixed ancestry and his travels, he really had an idea of Africa; or whether the idea of Africa had come to him, and his friends at school, from the atlas. Wasn’t Ferdinand still—like Metty, during his journey from the coast—the kind of man who, among strange tribes, would starve rather than eat their strange food? Did Ferdinand have a much larger idea of Africa than Zabeth, who moved with assurance from her village to the town only because she knew she was especially protected?
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. And when I pushed him past the stage where he could repeat bits of what he had heard at the lycée, 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.
The conversations that Ferdinand, in this character, attempted with me had a serial quality, because he wasn’t always well briefed. He took a discussion up to a certain point and then dropped it without embarrassment, as though it had been a language exercise in which he would do better next time. Then, returning to old ways, he would look for Metty and leave me.
Though I was learning more of what went on in the lycée (so quickly colonial-snobbish again), and what went on in the mind of Ferdinand, I didn’t feel I was getting closer to him. When I had considered him a mystery, distant and mocking behind his mask-like face, I had seen him as a solid person. Now I felt that his affectations were more than affectations, that his personality had become fluid. I began to feel that there was nothing there, and the thought of a lycée full of Ferdinands made me nervous.
Yet there was the idea of his importance. It unsettled me—there wasn’t going to be security for anyone in the country—and it unsettled Metty. When you get away from the chiefs and the politicians there is a simple democracy about Africa: everyone is a villager. Metty was a shop assistant and a kind of servant; Ferdinand was a lycée boy with a future; yet the friendship between the two men was like the friendship between equals. That friendship continued. But Metty, as a servant in our family house, had seen playmates grow into masters; and he must have felt himself—with his new idea of his worth—being left behind again.
I was in the flat one day when I heard them come in. Metty was explaining his connection with me and the shop, explaining his journey from the coast.
Metty said: “My family used to know his family. They used to call me Billy. I was studying bookkeeping. I’m not staying here, you know. I am going to Canada. I’ve got my papers and everything. I’m just waiting for my medical.”
Billy! Well, it was close to Ali. Canada—that was where one of my brothers-in-law had gone; in a letter I received shortly after Metty joined me I had heard about the anxiety of the family about that brother-in-law’s “medical.” That was no doubt where Metty had picked up the talk