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By Root 6045 0

ée some boys from the warrior tribes to the east. They were an immensely tall people; and, as Metty told me with awe, they were used to being carried around on litters by their slaves, who were of a smaller, squatter race. For these tall men of the forest there had always been European admiration. Ever since I could remember there had been articles about them in the magazines—these Africans who cared nothing about planting or trade and looked down, almost as much as Europeans, on other Africans. This European admiration still existed; articles and photographs continued to appear in magazines, in spite of the changes that had come to Africa. In fact, there were now Africans who felt as the Europeans did, and saw the warrior people as the highest kind of African.

At the lycée, still so colonial in spite of everything, the new boys had created a stir. Ferdinand, both of whose parents were traders, had decided to try out the role of the indolent forest warrior. He couldn’t slump around at the lycée and pretend he was used to being waited on by slaves. But he thought he could practise on me.

I knew other things about the forest kingdom, though. I knew that the slave people were in revolt and were being butchered back into submission. But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away.

Metty said, “We must go there, patron. I hear it is the last good place in Africa. Y a encore bien, bien des blancs côté-qui-là. It have a lot of white people up there still. They tell me that in Bujumbura it is like a little Paris.”

If I believed that Metty understood a quarter of the things he said—if I believed, for instance, that he really longed for the white company at Bujumbura, or knew where or what Canada was—I would have worried about him. But I knew him better; I knew when his chat was just chat. Still, what chat! The white people had been driven out from our town, and their monuments destroyed. But there were a lot of white people up there, in another town, and warriors and slaves. And that was glamour for the warrior boys, glamour for Metty, and glamour for Ferdinand.

I began to understand how simple and uncomplicated the world was for me. For people like myself and Mahesh, and the uneducated Greeks and Italians in our town, the world was really quite a simple place. We could understand it, and if too many obstacles weren’t put in our way we could master it. It didn’t matter that we were far away from our civilization, far away from the doers and makers. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t make the things we liked to use, and as individuals were even without the technical skills of primitive people. In fact, the less educated we were, the more at peace we were, the more easily we were carried along by our civilization or civilizations.

For Ferdinand there was no such possibility. He could never be simple. The more he tried, the more confused he became. His mind wasn’t empty, as I had begun to think. It was a jumble, full of all kinds of junk.

With the arrival of the warrior boys, boasting had begun at the lycée, and I began to feel that Ferdinand—or somebody—had been boasting about me too. Or what had been got out of me. The word definitely appeared to have got around that term that I was interested in the education and welfare of young Africans.

Young men, not all of them from the lycée, took to turning up at the shop, sometimes with books in their hands, sometimes with an obviously borrowed Semper Aliquid Novi blazer. They wanted money. They said they were poor and wanted money to continue their studies. Some of these beggars were bold, coming straight to me and reciting their requests; the shy ones hung around until there was no one else in the shop. Only a few had bothered to prepare stories, and these stories were like Ferdinand’s: a father dead or far away, a mother in a village, an unprotected boy full of ambition.

I was amazed by the stupidity, then irritated, then unsettled. None of these people seemed to mind being rebuffed or being hustled out of the shop