A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [63]
Ferdinand’s eyes went hard. He banged the lid of his desk and stood up. “You are asking a complicated question.”
And “complicated,” among these students, was clearly a word of disapproval.
Indar said, “You are forgetting. I didn’t raise the question. You raised it, and I merely asked for information.”
That restored order, put an end to the banging of the desk lids. It made Ferdinand friendly again, and he remained friendly for the rest of the seminar. He went to Indar at the end, when the boys in the jackets de boy pushed in chromium-plated trolleys and began serving coffee and sweet biscuits (part of the style the President had decreed for the Domain).
I said to Ferdinand, “You’ve been heckling my friend.”
He said, “I wouldn’t have done it if I had known he was your friend.”
Indar said, “What are your own feelings about African religion?”
Ferdinand said, “I don’t know. That’s why I asked. It is not an easy question for me.”
Later, when Indar and I left the polytechnic building to walk back to his house, Indar said, “He’s pretty impressive. He’s your marchande’s son? That explains it. He’s got that little extra background.”
In the asphalted space outside the polytechnic building the flag was floodlit. Slender lamp standards lifted fluorescent arms down both sides of the main avenue; and the avenue was also lit with lights at grass level, like an airport runway. Some of the bulbs had been broken and grass had grown tall around the fittings.
I said, “His mother’s also a magician.”
Indar said, “You can’t be too careful. They were tough tonight, but they didn’t ask the really difficult question. Do you know what that is? Whether Africans are peasants. It’s a nonsense question, but big battles are fought about that one. Whatever you say you get into trouble. You see why my outfit is needed. Unless we can get them thinking, and give them real ideas instead of just politics and principles, these young men will keep our world in turmoil for the next half century.”
I thought how far we had both come, to talk about Africa like this. We had even learned to take African magic seriously. It hadn’t been like that on the coast. But as we talked that evening about the seminar, I began to wonder whether Indar and I weren’t fooling ourselves and whether we weren’t allowing the Africa we talked about to become too different from the Africa we knew. Ferdinand didn’t want to lose touch with the spirits; he was nervous of being on his own. That had been at the back of his question. We all understood his anxiety; but it was as though, at the seminar, everyone had been ashamed, or fearful, of referring to it directly. The discussion had been full of words of another kind, about religion and history. It was like that on the Domain; Africa there was a special place.
I wondered, too, about Indar. How had he arrived at his new attitudes? I had thought of him, since the coast, as a hater of Africa. He had lost a lot; I didn’t think he had forgiven. Yet he flourished on the Domain; it was his setting.
I was less “complicated”; I belonged to the town. And to leave the Domain and drive back to the town, to see the shacks, acres and acres of them, the rubbish mounds, to feel the presence of the river and the forest all around (more than landscaping now), to see the ragged groups outside the drinking booths, the squatters’ cooking fires on the pavements in the centre of the town—to do that drive back was to return to the Africa I knew. It was to climb down from the exaltation of the Domain, to grasp reality again. Did Indar believe in the Africa of words? Did anyone on the Domain believe? Wasn’t the truth what we in the town lived with—the salesmen’s chat in the van der Weyden and the bars, the photographs of the President in government offices and in our shops, the army barracks in the converted palace of the man of our community?
Indar said, “Does one believe in anything? Does it matter?”
There was a ritual I went through whenever I had