A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [52]
Visitors were encouraged, from the cités and shanty towns, from the surrounding villages. On Sundays there were buses and army trucks to take people there, and soldiers acted as guides, taking people along one-way paths marked with directional arrows, showing the people who had recently wished to destroy the town what their President had done for Africa. Such shoddy buildings, after you got used to the shapes; such flashy furniture—Noimon was making a fortune with his furniture shop. All around, the life of dugout and creek and village continued; in the bars in the town the foreign builders and artisans drank and made easy jokes about the country. It was painful and it was sad.
The President had wished to show us a new Africa. And I saw Africa in a way I had never seen it before, saw the defeats and humiliations which until then I had regarded as just a fact of life. And I felt like that—full of tenderness for the Big Man, for the ragged villagers walking around the Domain, and the soldiers showing them the shabby sights—until some soldier played the fool with me or some official at the customs was difficult, and then I fell into the old way of feeling, the easier attitudes of the foreigners in the bars. Old Africa, which seemed to absorb everything, was simple; this place kept you tense. What a strain it was, picking your way through stupidity and aggressiveness and pride and hurt!
But what was the Domain to be used for? The buildings gave pride, or were meant to; they satisfied some personal need of the President’s. Was that all they were for? But they had consumed millions. The farm didn’t materialize. The Chinese or the Taiwanese didn’t turn up to till the land of the new model African farm; the six tractors that some foreign government had given remained in a neat line in the open and rusted, and the grass grew high about them. The big swimming pool near the building that was said to be a conference hall developed leaks and remained empty, with a wide-meshed rope net at the top. The Domain had been built fast, and in the sun and the rain decay also came fast. After the first rainy season many of the young trees that had been planted beside the wide main avenue died, their roots waterlogged and rotted.
But for the President in the capital the Domain remained a living thing. Statues were added, and lamp standards. The Sunday visits went on; the photographs continued to appear in the subsidized magazines that specialized in Africa. And then at last a use was found for the buildings.
The Domain became a university city and a research centre. The conference-hall building was turned into a polytechnic for people of the region, and other buildings were turned into dormitories and staff quarters. Lecturers and professors began to come from the capital, and soon from other countries; a parallel life developed there, of which we in the town knew little. And it was to the polytechnic there—on the site of the dead European suburb that to me, when I first came, had suggested the ruins of a civilization that had come and gone—that Ferdinand was sent on a government scholarship, when he had finished at the lycée.
The Domain was some miles away from the town. There was a bus service, but it was irregular. I hadn’t been seeing much of Ferdinand, and now I saw even less of him. Metty lost a friend. That move of Ferdinand’s finally made the difference between the two men clear, and I thought that Metty suffered.
My own feelings were more complicated. I saw a disordered future for the country. No one was going to be secure here; no man of the country was to be envied. Yet I couldn’t help thinking how lucky Ferdinand was, how easy it had been made for him. You took a boy out of the bush and you taught