The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [107]
The politician carries that sense of outrage as well. But sitting in the cabinet or debating in the Council, he has to see agriculture as an issue. He knows its value to the precarious economy of his country. He has the facts and figures; he knows the world price of sugar or copra; he knows who guarantees his export markets. He knows that peasant farming is uneconomical and land resettlement schemes quixotic. He knows that the interest of his country is bound up with that of the estates, and that the estates are on his side. He knows they are agreeable to some modification in taxation. He chooses to forget the figures wading in mud; he chooses to forget the outrage he felt at the overseers’ compound. All this is superficial and irrelevant; but it was that that spurred him on. All his leadership lies in taking back this message to his people. He is a politician, a man lifted out of himself.
We began in bluff. We continued in bluff. But there was a difference. We began in innocence, believing in the virtue of the smell of sweat. We continued with knowledge, of poverty and power. The colonial politician is an easy object of satire. I wish to avoid satire; I will leave out the stories of illiteracy and social innocence. Not that I wish to present him as grander or less flawed than he is. It is that his situation satirizes itself, turns satire inside out, takes satire to a point where it touches pathos if not tragedy. Out of his immense violation words come easily to him, too easily. He must go back on his words. In success he must lay aside violation. He must betray himself and in the end he has no cause save his own survival. The support he has attracted, not ideal to ideal, but bitterness to bitterness, he betrays and mangles: emancipation is not possible for all.
We had spoken, for instance, of the need to get rid of the English expatriates who virtually monopolized the administrative section of our civil service. We had represented their presence as an indignity and an intolerable strain on our Treasury. They received overseas allowances; their housing was subsidized; every three years they and their families were given passages to London. Each expatriate cost us twice as much as a local man. One degree less of innocence would have shown us how incapable we were of doing without expatriates: they were so numerous that to pay them all compensation would have wrecked our finances for at least two years, and we were in no position to break agreements. Besides, not a few of the higher technical men, in forestry and agriculture, were subsidized by London, under a generous scheme for colonial aid.
We let the issue hang. We issued a statement about our confidence in the loyalty of the civil service; and from our own lower ministerial people there emanated from time to time disingenuous parables about the black and white keys of the piano working together to create harmony. In fact, we were beginning to discover in ourselves a deep reluctance to render the civil service more local. In the secretive atmosphere of our own power game some people preferred to be served by men who were no threats to them, who at the end of their service would return to their own country.
This did not satisfy the local men. They had been among our most intelligent supporters. Now they felt betrayed; and a man of fifty does not accept the message, however sympathetically given, that he will receive promotion after his superior of forty-five has worked out a life-contract. There was much discontent. It crept into White Paper, the civil service journal which, until our advent, contained lists of appointments and transfers and