The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [111]
An English firm began making biscuits. Someone else made toothpaste or brought down the machinery for filling tubes with toothpaste. I am not sure now what it was they did. We encouraged a local adventurer to tin local fruit. This was a failure. It hadn’t occurred to anyone concerned to find out whether local people wanted local fruit tinned; no one else did either. The same man went in later for tinning margarine and was a success. The margarine was imported, the tins were imported. Our effort was to operate a machine that turned the flattened tins into cylinders. We capped one end, filled the cylinder with the imported margarine, and capped the other end. I remember the process well. I opened the factory. Our margarine was slightly more expensive than imported tinned margarine, and had to be protected. I believe the factory employed five black ladies, whom we photographed looking grave and technical in white coats.
Industrialization, in territories like ours, seems to be a process of filling imported tubes and tins with various imported substances. Whenever we went beyond this we were likely to get into trouble. There was, for instance, the plastics business, later the plastics scandal, to which my name was attached. A Czech came to me one day. He represented himself as a refugee from a giant Dutch firm and proposed that we should set him up as the head of a state-run plastics factory. He dazzled us with the possibilities of plastics; and I must confess I was attracted by his nationality. In time he produced some plastic combs and plastic bowls. They were a mottled brown or a mangy blue. But there was something irremediably wrong with his process. Everything he made literally stank. Crunch-time was coming – let this be remembered in the midst of all these adventures, all this activity and drama – and I have no doubt that the plastics affair would have been used to weaken me, if there had not occurred, at about the same time as the Czech was making his getaway, the great news about the bauxite contract.
We had committed ourselves from the outset to renegotiating the bauxite contract. It was our only major resource, and its exploitation, in the late 1930s, was perhaps the only thing that had rescued our economy from total ruin and saved our island from revolution. But many people were not satisfied; there was a widespread feeling that the contract had been negotiated in anxiety and ignorance, and that we were not getting what we should. The Socialist created brilliant pictures of what could be done with increased royalties. The trouble about bauxite, though, is that nearly everybody in the world is a layman. The colonial politician who vows to renegotiate a bauxite contract is in the position of a physics teacher who promises to make an atom bomb for his fifth formers. We were in trouble before we began. We had no knowledge and didn’t know where we could get knowledge. London wasn’t helpful. We wanted an expert; we were willing to pay. But there was apparently no such person as a bauxite expert who was free and willing.
I made official approaches to the companies. They replied with unofficial invitations to friendly barbecue parties beside swimming-pools. They were very friendly parties. The men had friendly rolls of flesh about their waist; they played with balls and dogs and occasionally dropped stern words to splashing children. Meat hissed over charcoal; laughing wives basted. In this atmosphere talk about bauxite seemed perverse, when it came from me, and threatening, when it came from them. A new arrival was greeted; a silent local housemaid appeared; someone laughed at a swimming dog. And I was being told that in South America bauxite, of excellent grade, lay below white sand, which had just to be hosed off; that in Jamaica the bauxite lay just below a couple of inches of stoneless earth; and that Australia was in fact a continent made entirely of bauxite. The bauxite of Isabella was difficult