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By Root 416 0

dressed and powdered and, to the delight of his parents and envy of his schoolfellows, had sung that so successful coon song. From these letters I could gather not only his contempt for our colleagues who were no longer made sharp by their personal bitterness; not only his contempt for the endless stream of mendicants who appealed to him in the name of their common race and their common past; I began to feel that I was entering a fantasy which was like my own. Here was more than longing for the past we had destroyed, of erratic magazines with statements of policy, of occasional pamphlets, of quick ideas worked out in bars. Here was a longing for different landscapes, a different world, where a child’s first memory of school was of taking an apple to the teacher and where, in essays at least, days were spent on temperate farms. Here was a longing, like my own, for freedom and what we considered the truth of our personalities. In fantasy, perhaps, this truth was one of the things success ought to have brought; the disappointments of fantasy are not the less real. So we each to the other explained our actions or inaction – what else, I see, was the purpose of my own ponderous essay on Pompey – while we continued to be political colleagues, each supporting the other.

It was in the third year of our government that there occurred the incident which made Isabella notorious; and yet it did not lessen our reputation outside for stability and good sense. It was the tasteless idea of the Cercle Sportif to celebrate Browne’s birthday with a fancy-dress ball, and it was the tasteless idea of some people to turn up as African tribesmen with spears and little beards. Word got to Browne before the evening was over – a waiter at the Cercle had thought it his duty – and on the following morning instant deportation orders had been served on everyone at the party who could be deported. A number of expatriate civil servants were caught in this way.

For two or three days Browne raved, in public meetings, in the Council, on the radio. He seemed to have gone off his head. He was like a man anxious to stir up a racial uprising. The newspapers at last objected. One ran a cartoon showing our airport lounge with three doors: Arrivals, Departures, Deportures. Browne instantly calmed down. He issued a reasonable statement about his and the government’s attitudes to racial clubs. There was no objection to them, he said, provided they were not maintained in any open or hidden way by public funds; there was no objection to the Cercle Sportif as such because it was no longer a place where ‘decisions concerning the deepest interests of our country are taken over whisky-and-soda’. His outburst had embarrassed many of us. But it did him no harm. It strengthened his position and won him a good deal of sympathetic foreign press comment; his subsequent statement about racial clubs was considered statesmanlike by outsiders and ‘diplomatic’ by his supporters. Poor Browne! Into what a position had he manoeuvred himself? Did he still know what he thought about anything?

There was a sequel. About a month later there began to circulate an anonymous satirical tale called The Niger and the Seine. It was in English but so closely modelled on Candide it read like a translation from the French. Slavery has just been abolished, and the daughter of a French creole family comes home one day and announces that she is going to marry a Negro. Her worthy statement about her motives is cut short by her father, who embraces her. He not only agrees to the marriage but promises to do what he can to rehabilitate the Negro and the Negro’s family. He will send his son-in-law to Paris and pay for his education. All this is done and soon there is established on the island a Negro family of some substance. Their descendants continue the practice of inter-racial marriage. So too do the descendants of the French family: their load of guilt is heavy and their liberalism is tenacious. In time both families undergo some degree of racial alteration. It happens, then, that one day the daughter