The Mimic Men: A Novel

  He ignored us all and went straight to Browne, redeemer of the race. He unwrapped a parcel he was carrying and offered the contents: a small bookstand, which he said he had made himself. He began to tell his story. But his distress did not abate and his words could not always be followed. For years, he said, he had been working for an English contracting firm. For years he had been passed over when it came to promotion. Inferior Negroes were the ones his employers selected for promotion, to prove that Negroes couldn’t do responsible jobs well. For years he had been subjected to insult and had kept his peace. Now he could speak. All the insults he had secreted over the years he now poured out, in proof of his virtue and merit. He had worked in the evenings on the bookstand; he had despaired of finding someone worthy to give it to. This was no longer so. Look: the bookstand was made of four interlocking, detachable pieces: no glue had been used.

  It was an old story, one we had hardened ourselves to. Even distress, if sufficiently repeated, becomes vulgar. But this scene was large and moving. The old Negro in his old suit, discoloured at the edges and under the arms, a man I could see cycling back from the humiliations of his office, hat on his head, the badge of respectability, cycling back to his street where he was no doubt respected and where perhaps he had created for himself the character of the wise old Negro who knew the ways of the white world but would speak only when the time came. The time was now!

  Browne listened without irritation. When the old man was finished he said, ‘You must leave this firm. It is the only advice I can give you.’ The old man looked stunned. Browne waited, then went on, ‘Look. I could take up this telephone here and get on to the Chairman. Tomorrow morning you would be sitting in the Manager’s chair.’ This directness in Browne’s speech, this folksy creation of pictures, was new; it was as impressive as the confidence he showed in his own power. The old Negro looked abashed, playing with the idea of himself in the Manager’s chair. We were all silent, studying Browne, the magician, the man now apart. ‘But then what?’ he asked abruptly, irritably. The old Negro looked down; he was going to say no more. ‘Then what?’ Browne said. ‘You want me to tell you? Somebody in London would decide that they want to get this contract or that contract. And then what? Who would be the man they would send to ask me? To bribe me. Who?’

  And the old Negro, playing the rhetorical game, answered with pride and satisfaction: ‘They would send me.’

  The audience was over. Petitioner and court were satisfied. And I thought: goodness, in a few hours consciousness of power has turned a semi-politician, a semi-ideologue, a joker, into a folk-leader.

  He recognized our admiration. He said, simulating impatience, ‘If I stay here these damn people will eat me up.’

  And now I could no longer read his ambivalence.

  Did Browne believe in his power? Was he overwhelmed by the despair that comes at the moment of success and the knowledge that success changes nothing? He had shown me the nature of the violation we had been exploiting. Did he feel, like me, that violation was violation and could not be undone, even from where he stood, the limit of his ambition? I could no longer read his ambivalance. All I knew was that the time came when he longed to step down, to return to the past we had so lightly destroyed. But how could such a man, who had revealed such power, be permitted to do so by those faceless men – M for Minister, M for master – whom we had created? Like me, he became a prisoner of his role.

  So the Roman house died a second time. Browne presently moved into his official residence. There he was protected from mendicants, petitioners, lunatics and even his colleagues. He took to writing me letters. I thought at first they were meant to reassure me, like his whispers on the public platform. Then I began to feel that they were exercises. I caught his mood; my letters matched his. It was an undergraduate correspondence, somewhat pretentious, a little like that I was carrying on with Wendy’s brother agonizing now in Quebec over a separate French state as well as Shiva’s dance of life and death. Browne and I wrote as though for publication. We wrote about books we had read, ideas that had struck us; we wrote about everything except the work we had undertaken; and though in our letters we referred to our meetings, we never, when we met, referred to our letters. We continued, though less frequently, to appear together in public, each still being his role. But we were no closer there than we were in cabinet, where each man was alone, secretive, careful. The process of learning had begun, and each man was keeping his knowledge to himself.

  We learned about power. We learned about our poverty. The two went together, but it was our poverty which made the understanding of power more urgent. In territories like ours the process of learning about power takes four years. Our constitutions usually prescribe an election in the fifth year; and it is in the fifth year that people begin feverishly to challenge the strength of their rivals or colleagues. Everyone’s bluff is called, and the strong are revealed. There is an upheaval; the result often is that second elections are never held. Crunch-time came in Isabella and I was the one to go. I went like a lamb. I blame no one. It was left to me to act, and I didn’t. I held a good many of the cards. I threw them away. My behaviour seemed logical enough to me at the time. Now it seems irresponsible.

  It was part of our innocence that at the beginning we should have considered applause and the smell of sweat as the only source of power. It took us no time to see that we depended on what was no more than a mob, and that our hold on the mob was the insecure one of words. I went a little beyond this. I saw that in our situation the mob, without skills, was unproductive, offered nothing, and was in the end without power. The mob might burn down the city. But the mob is shot down, and the power of money will cause the city to be built again. In the moment of victory we had wondered why no one had called our bluff. Soon we saw that there had been no need, that our power was air. We had no trade unions behind us, no organized capital. We had no force of nationalism even, only the negative frenzy of a deep violation which could lead to further frenzy alone, the vision of the world going up in flames: it was the only expiation.

  The situation was squalid. But we were among men to whom, in trips abroad at the invitation of foreign governments, in conferences in London, in the chauffeured Humbers and in the first-class hotels of half a dozen cities, the richness of the world was suddenly revealed. We were among men who felt more cheated, more bitter in their power than they had ever done before, men who feared that the rich world so wonderfully open to them might at any moment be withdrawn. Each man therefore sought to turn that airy power, which his anxiety rightly painted to him as insecure, into a reality. Some sought it in quick money. The emissaries of Swiss banks came to us: this corruption at the edges we were powerless to prevent. Some tried to become labour leaders. Some tried to subvert the police. To all, the proclamation of distress was necessary, with its complement of racial antagonism.

  We were trapped in our situation. Each attempt at the establishing of a personal security prepared the way for further disorder. The vision alarmed me, to tell the truth. I prepared a five-thousand-word paper for cabinet on the reorganization of the police force. It was my aim to rehabilitate it socially, to rid it of its association with backyards; I wanted to see it integrated into such responsible elements of society as we possessed. I proposed to keep on British officers while we created our own officer class; there was to be no sudden promotion for the unqualified or the socially unacceptable. The paper made me suspect. It was dismissed as illiberal by the spokesmen for bitterness; nothing was done. I saw that in our situation the police force or the regiment might itself become a state, like its parent, in which power might change at any time, the soldier might refuse to obey, and indeed ten determined men might wipe out the leadership they refuse to obey because they see no reason why it should be obeyed.

  I had never thought of obedience as a problem. Now it seemed to me the miracle of society. Given our situation, anarchy was endless, unless we acted right away. But on power and the consolidation of passin
g power we wasted our energies, until the bigger truth came: that in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the outside. Such was the controlled chaos we had, with such enthusiasm, brought upon ourselves.

  The vision of hysteria, wrongheaded, criminally irresponsible: perhaps. But it weakened me. I was overwhelmed by the cruelty of what I saw. I withdrew into my role. So too did Browne, who had talked so much of distress and dignity as discoveries in themselves, but had not thought to go further. He never learned anything beyond that first day. He remained the folk-leader, waiting like me for crunch-time. His role was his strength. Mine exposed me to danger from my colleagues.

  I continued to run The Socialist as before, proclaiming the dignity of distress. My speeches maintained their old tone of protest. I never abandoned the character of the dandy. In this was neither honesty nor dishonesty; it was the easiest way out. But I became identified in the public mind with a type of opposition from within, and this won me favour. Soon I saw how by my blind consistency, my refusal to manoeuvre, my position, in the eyes of my colleagues, became one of strength and especially dangerous. I held too many of the cards. I could have got the big money on my side, to apply a squeeze here and there when necessary; I could have got the banks, the Stockwells, the bauxite companies; I could have got that middle-class to which by instinct I belonged; and I could have drawn numbers from the rural workers, picturesque Asiatics like myself, ever ready to listen to the call of the blood. I might have rescued myself from the falseness of the position of the simple sharer of distress: the convert, suspect to both the faithful and the infidel. The cards were all mine. I played none and puzzled everyone by my folly.

  Like Browne, I was no politician. The prospect of power in Isabella fatigued me. Easier, much easier, the path that had been chosen for me. And there was my correspondence with Browne, and with Wendy’s brother in Quebec. To one I wrote fanciful disquisitions about the cosmic dance. To the other I wrote more and more about history, with which I was becoming absorbed. I remember I wrote a long essay about the behaviour of Pompey during the Civil War, which had always seemed to me a puzzle – this was the sort of ‘safe’ subject Browne and I now corresponded about. I thought I kept up this correspondence for the sake of the people I wrote to and for the sake of that self they saw in me. But it had the effect of deepening my conviction that I had a secret, deeper life. Below the public dandy, the political manoeuvrer and organizer; below that, this negation. I distrusted romance. See, though, how I yielded to it.

  A man, I suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connection between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right. There was my sense of wrongness, beginning with the stillness of that morning of return when I looked out on the slave island and tried to pretend it was mine. There was my sense of intrusion which deepened as I felt my power to be more and more a matter of words. So defiantly, in my mind, I asserted my character as intruder, the picturesque Asiatic born for other landscapes.

  And then there was the madman’s lure: my belief in my star, not the star of fortune, but the star that, if only I surrendered to situations, if only I did what I had been called upon to do, would take me to my appointed place. The compassion of the messiah, the man doing penance for the world: I have already explained the absurd sentiments which surprised me at the moment of greatest power and self-cherishing, the feeling that we were all riding to the end of the flat world: the child’s vision, or the conqueror’s, the beginning of religion or neurosis.

  4

  THE child, driving with his grandfather along a country road on a day of rain, sees the sodden mud-and-grass huts of the estate labourers. He sees the labourers wading up to their shins in black mud which, drying, will cake white on their dark skins. He exclaims: ‘Why can’t they give them leggings?’ His grandfather says, ‘Leggings cost money.’ It is a disappointing reply, the child feels; and when he sees the compound of the overseers’ houses, ochre walls with red roofs, fair-haired children playing in the scruffy gardens, he is outraged.

  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 retirements, news of people on leave, reports of salary negotiations, and sometimes a very carefully written short story which usually began with people drinking, elaborately, in a bar and one man being reminded of a strange incident. We decided to break one or two of the higher and more vocally disappointed local men. It was not hard. White Paper helped us. We contrasted the old acquiescence with the new irre
verence and suggested that it was the new régime that was being affronted. The offending civil servants were coloured men; they spent their leaves in England and sent their children to English schools; they sought to keep their complexions clear and their hair straight by selective marriages. Their punishment was just. Nothing we said was untrue; the public approved.

  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.