A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [4]
Metty, the half-African boy who had grown up in my family’s house on the coast and had come to join me, Metty said that Zabeth’s smell was strong enough to keep mosquitoes away. I thought myself that it was this smell that kept men away from Zabeth, in spite of her fleshiness (which the men here liked) and in spite of her vanity case—because Zabeth wasn’t married and, so far as I knew, lived with no man.
But the smell was meant to keep people at a distance. It was Metty—learning local customs fast—who told me that Zabeth was a magician, and was known in our region as a magician. Her smell was the smell of her protecting ointments. Other women used perfumes and scents to attract; Zabeth’s ointments repelled and warned. She was protected. She knew it, and other people knew it.
I had treated Zabeth so far as a marchande and a good customer. Now that I knew that in our region she was a person of power, a prophetess, I could never forget it. So the charm worked on me as well.
2
Africa was my home, had been the home of my family for centuries. But we came from the east coast, and that made the difference. The coast was not truly African. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean. True Africa was at our back. Many miles of scrub or desert separated us from the upcountry people; we looked east to the lands with which we traded—Arabia, India, Persia. These were also the lands of our ancestors. But we could no longer say that we were Arabians or Indians or Persians; when we compared ourselves with these people, we felt like people of Africa.
My family was Muslim. But we were a special group. We were distinct from the Arabs and other Muslims of the coast; in our customs and attitudes we were closer to the Hindus of northwestern India, from which we had originally come. When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor my grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.
I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber. He couldn’t tell me when he had done this. It was just there in his memory, floating around, without date or other association, as an unusual event in an uneventful life. He didn’t tell it as a piece of wickedness or trickery or as a joke; he just told it as something unusual that he had done—not shipping the slaves, but describing them as rubber. And without my own memory of the old man’s story I suppose that would have been a piece of history lost forever. I believe, from my later reading, that the idea of rubber would have occurred to my grandfather at the time, before the First World War, when rubber became big business—and later a big scandal—in central Africa. So that facts are known to me which remained hidden or uninteresting to my grandfather.
Of that whole period of upheaval in Africa—the expulsion of the Arabs, the expansion of Europe, the parcelling out of the continent—that is the only family story I have. That was the sort of people we were. All that I know of our history and the history of the Indian Ocean I have got from books written by Europeans. If I say that our Arabs in their time were great adventurers and writers; that our sailors gave the Mediterranean the lateen sail that