The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [108]
From London there presently came more offers of technical aid and experts on short-term contracts. We gratefully accepted; so that in the end there were more expatriates than before. Some of our ministers took pains to be seen in public with their English permanent secretaries, who behaved impeccably. It was what these ministers offered their followers: the spectacle of the black man served by the white: the revolution we claimed to have created.
Satire creeps in. But understand the colonial politician. It might have been personal indignities that drove him on. He can reply in success only with personal dignity, and for some little time it satisfies his followers. He is a symbol; he holds out hope for all. It is part of his function then to turn to the trappings of power: the motorcar marked M, the suits on the hottest days, the attendant white men and women. Understand, too, his jumpiness. He knows his own futility; and every time he returns from the rich world his delighted reaction to his country – ‘At least this portion of the world is mine’ – is quickly lost in the uneasiness he feels at the precariousness of his position. For the future he cannot read he must lay up money; uneasiness turns to panic even on that ceremonial drive from airport to city which also takes him past the compound of the tall ochre-and-red overseers’ houses. Understand the jumpiness, the sensitivity to criticism, the solitude.
Understand Browne’s irrational, panicky behaviour, the disappearance of his frivolity, his angry descents among us and the people, and together with the assertion of his personal dignity his proclamation now not of distress alleviated but of distress just discovered, and greater than before. He had settled in the role of folk-leader. He did not have the courage to go beyond that; he had come to terms with the bitterness and self-disgust his role must have brought him. His speeches altered, though to the public their substance remained the same. Whereas before he had spoken of distress as though speaking only to the distressed, now he seemed to be addressing the guilty as well. He shrieked at them, he lamented, he tried to terrify. His defiance became as shameful as the thing he preached against. He was, I saw, in competition with his inferiors. But it paid off. It made him into a figure of a kind; it won him paragraphs in weeklies of international circulation. The outsiders who would have been chilled by his earlier appeals to dignity and stoicism, because such appeals would have excluded them, were now flattered by the more recognizable anguish he proclaimed and were willing to recognize him as a leader at last. Even if there had been the will to go forward from the emptiness of his position, this recognition would have weakened it.
Our correspondence continued, that oblique irrelevant exchange which yet, as I can now see, revealed so much; and it was from this correspondence that I began to feel that more and more he would have liked to step down from the role that imprisoned him, as once his house next to the Kremlin barber shop had imprisoned him. In his letters he took me back to the past, back to London, back to the writing of his unfinished novel, back to Isabella Imperial and the days of my father’s agitation, back to the child who had been