The Writer and the World: Essays

  “Price doesn’t look it,” the Guatemalan Vice-President says, “but he is a Negro. If he was a Maya Indian and a patriot, as some people say, he wouldn’t have got mixed up with all those Negroes over there.”

  Once, when he was only a nationalist agitator, the first in British Honduras, the Guatemalan claim was useful to George Price. Now, as Premier, he is trapped by the claim; it erodes his power.

  “I DON’T THINK anybody felt the life was going to come so quickly to an end. After Ghana one could do nothing about it and one wanted to do nothing about it.”

  A visit to Trinidad in 1934–35 was the Governor’s first glimpse of a colony. It made him think of a career in the Colonial Service.

  “I liked the ambience, the friendliness of the people. Mark you, in those days there were far fewer opportunities for people like myself in the industrial or commercial world, for people who had—it tends to be a dirty word—a public school education.” The Governor was at Weymouth in Dorset. “Long since defunct.”

  “I applied to join the Colonial Service before the war. I was at Cambridge, came down in June 1939. Thought I might as well have a regular commission and get properly involved instead of hanging around getting pushed around. I was a prisoner most of the war. I was in the Royal Tank Corps. Captured in Calais in 1940. After the war I was seconded as ADC to Sierra Leone. When I was released from the Army I joined the Colonial Service and became a District Commissioner. I had great difficulty getting rid of my regular commission. Not because they particularly wanted me—I’m sure of that—but on principle …

  “The work of ADC was one of the most fascinating jobs you could ever have. You were virtually on your own in those days. You got very attached to the people. We all felt a sense of participation. One talks of colonialism now … People tend to look at Empire in the context of the last fifty or one hundred years. But I think it fair to say that without Empire over the centuries there wouldn’t have been the spread of knowledge. Africa is the most contentious example, I suppose. I feel there must be something on the credit side. This is no criticism of the local people. They were prisoners of their own circumstances …

  “It was the most rewarding part of my life. You were very clearly defined. One knew exactly, in one’s modest way, what one was trying to do. You weren’t humbugged too much by what we used to call the Secretariat. We were alone much of the time. Pretty early evenings, no electric lights. We had small children. That kept us pretty busy. We used to read a lot. One spent a lot of time on tour. Of course, in those days one walked, seeing what was going on.”

  ON THE STROKE of eight the Land-Rover sweeps up the short drive to the portico of Government House. The Premier, tall and slender, in an open-necked braided Yucatan-style shirt, bounces out after his aide.

  “Morning, Excellency!”

  The Premier likes to use titles and he always appears to put them between inverted commas.

  It is the day of the Premier’s weekly tour; the visiting writer will go with him. The Governor, in white shirt and tie, is there to greet the Premier. The formalities are brief and urgent. The aide runs to close the Land-Rover door, and soon we are on the road.

  “Marnin’, Miss Virginia.”

  When the Premier waves he abandons conversation and concentrates; he is like a man giving a benediction.

  Nine men are standing around a small patch on the main road. The PWD lorries have broken down again. The Premier makes a note. Later we pass PWD mounds of earth.

  “Jarge Price, clean the road!” someone shouts.

  We stop often.

  “Marnin’, marnin’.”

  The Premier strides ahead in his flapping shirt, loose tan trousers and big black shoes. The aide runs, to protect the Premier against enraged dogs. The muscular young Negro driver stands beside his vehicle, chewing gum, tall, in boots, tight jeans and jersey, dark glasses.

  “Marnin’. It’s Jarge Price, the Premier. Lemme see your kitchen. Lemme see wa’ you cook this marnin’.”

  He lifts lids, examines breakfast plates, gives his benediction. And we bolt for the Land-Rover.

  WHEN GEORGE PRICE left the seminary, for financial reasons, he found a job with a local self-made timber millionaire. He stayed with him for fourteen years as secretary and travelling companion.

  “We travelled everywhere. I remember one day at a hotel in Chicago putting a value on the people around the dining table. I made it three hundred million dollars. When you mix with people like that all the time you can’t feel too much envy. I very early on had the feeling of sic transit gloria mundi. Turton had all this money. But he was a sick man …

  “Whenever I went into a bank I used to feel: you are entering the temple of the capitalists. I suppose I used to say it sometimes. Turton didn’t always like the things I said. I was quoting to him one day from the 1931 Encyclical—I think it was Quadragesimo Anno. About relations between employer and worker, the living wage and so on. He listened and I thought I was getting through. At the end he said, ‘Jarge, the Pope doesn’t know a shit about business.’

  “It was Turton who made me go into politics. He said, ‘You will go into politics.’ He made me run for the Belize City Council in 1944. I lost. Now if a doctor said to me to give up politics, I wouldn’t.”

  But politics do not stand still. The colonial politician who is the first leader and educator is also the man who most speedily makes himself out of date. Politics as the vocation of the failed priest, the empty land as the parish: it no longer answers. The Guatemalan claim has made the politics of British Honduras artificial and static. Development, like independence itself, recedes. The Premier has been to these villages too often before; he is no longer a man with news.

  “They don’t seem to be looking for a messiah,” the Premier’s second-in-command says. “They seem to want participation. Or collective leadership. I think Mr. Price senses this change in the country. He has recently enlarged his cabinet.”

  “I am getting old,” the Premier says. “I am not a fighter as I used to be.”

  “ONE’S CAREER has changed quite completely from the way one envisaged it,” the Governor says. “One of the ironies is that most of the time one’s been working oneself out of a job. I’ve been extremely lucky. Very few left now, out of the old Colonial Service. Infinitesimal number really.”

  THE WORLD intrudes. The sons of people once content with the Premier’s benediction go away to study and come back and curse both parties. They talk of Vietnam and Black Power. They undermine the Negro loyalty to the slave past.

  “The whites are buying up the land. English colonialism tried to condition the black man against using the land. There was a concerted effort by the English colonialists to have their black slaves remain log-cutters. It became a sort of phallic symbol to the black to be a log-cutter.”

  The politics of British Honduras have always had a racial-religious undertone: the Negro-Protestant town, the Roman Catholic country. Now race threatens to make the old politics even more irrelevant. The Premier, white below his carefully maintained tan, a political vanity, is especially vulnerable.

  The Governor gets a report on the latest Black Power meeting.

  “They pulled in 150 last night. I must say I couldn’t make head or tail of what was said.”

  We are having drinks around the small new pool at the side of Government House. The sea breeze is moist.

  “Do you think he ’ll have lunch with me?” the American Consul asks. He is concerned: the local spokesman for Black Power, who is just twenty-one, went to an American university on an American government scholarship. “I wish someone would give me twelve thousand dollars to send my son to college.”

  The Consul is friendly, intelligent. He has had some experience of British colonies in transition. He “watched” the affairs of British Guiana at a time when the Jagan government was being overthrown by Negro racist riots and an American-supported strike.

  The United States has an interest: it is the true issue
of imperial succession.

  THE GOVERNOR, anxious to be active again, thinks of his own future.

  “There is no obligation on the part of the government to find another job for me. I don’t know what the future holds. But we’ve been lucky. The big concern was the education of one’s daughters, and we are more or less at the end of that tunnel.”

  The Governor will leave the Colonial Service with an affection for the countries he worked in, but with no great nostalgia. He will remain concerned about the debasing effect of tourism on backward countries, and all that these countries have to do.

  “Take the Gambia. You couldn’t get people to go to school in some areas. Most awful waste of manpower. Those people, as of now, they’ve not a hope in hell, and they’ll be living for, what, sixty, seventy years.”

  The Governor will also be taking back a memory of the midnight handover in the Gambia: the Union Jack coming down, the lights going off and coming on again, the new Gambian flag in place, the handshakes from the Gambians, delighted but also managing in that moment to express a personal concern for the Governor.

  The flag that came down that midnight is in the Governor’s Hampshire cottage. It was hung out of the window to celebrate his daughters’ success in the A-level examinations.

  THE PREMIER plans to build a retreat in the cool Mountain Pine Ridge region.

  “Mr. Price knows how to survive,” the Premier’s second-in-command says. “He’s a natural politician. I don’t see the demise of Mr. Price.”

  But in the clerical mischievousness of the Premier, which can at times be like arrogance, and in his daily routine, there is already more than a hint of withdrawal. He will fight to the end. But he also tells his supporters, “My day will come. I will go.”

  He has never cared for the things of the world. But for most of his life he has been immersed in them, and he often reflects on the strangeness of his career.

  “I have this recurring dream. I am in church. Someone is saying mass—Turton, my old employer, or Pinks, one of his managers—and I wonder why I, who would so much like to be up there, am not, and that old sinner is.”

  1969

  The Overcrowded Barracoon

  SIX CARPENTERS leave the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius to go to Swaziland in Southern Africa to work for a year, and it is front-page news in L’Express, the leading Mauritius newspaper. Six mouths less to feed; six families saved, at least for a year. Twenty-five nurses, men as well as women, are chosen for hospitals in England. England will swallow them up; but for the moment they are famous in their island, with their names at the top of the front page of the Mauritius Times. Perhaps ten thousand applied for those twenty-five vacancies. That is what is believed; those are the odds.

  “Your Majesty,” a young Mauritian writes to the Principal Nursing Officer of a Scottish hospital, “will you please find me a seat?” The newspaper correspondent who reports the joke back, himself a Mauritian, one of the lucky ones who got away, says that flattery like this will get young Mauritians nowhere. The correspondent is not unsympathetic; he says he knows that the young people of Mauritius are obsessed with the idea of escape and are “all the time morally and physically fatigued”; but the only ones who will succeed are those with “a fair knowledge of up-to-date things and a (really) good character and a love for nursing.”

  But so many are qualified. Since the only Mauritians acceptable abroad are nurses, in Mauritius they all love nursing. They are a nation of nurses. And they hang around the ministers’ doors in Port Louis, the capital, waiting for the call to serve. The ministers are all-powerful in Mauritius; nothing can be done except through a minister. But what can the ministers do? Once manna fell from heaven—this is how the Foreign Minister put it—and the Germans asked for five hundred nurses. But manna doesn’t fall every day; the hope that the French would take five thousand units a year remains a hope.

  There is a Minister of State for Emigration, a plump, chuckling mulatto, a former motor mechanic. But he can give no figures for emigration. He says he doesn’t carry these figures in his head; and, besides, he is preoccupied with a local election. “All our energies are devoted to this by-election at Curepipe. We think that Mauritius must have a good political climate to solve our problems.”

  The Minister can give no figures because there are not many figures to give. So the young men hang around, sometimes for years, waiting for their careers to begin. They meet in little clubhouses of concrete or corrugated iron, decorated with posters from the British Information Services or cut-outs from foreign magazines, and talk and talk. Some of them begin to suffer from spells of dizziness and have to stay at home. Many of them get headaches, those awful Mauritian headaches that can drive an unemployed labourer mad, interrupt the career of a civil servant, and turn educated young men into mindless invalids.

  It was on Mauritius that the dodo forgot how to fly, because it had no enemies: the island, 720 square miles, was once uninhabited. Now, with more than a thousand people to the square mile, the island is overpopulated.

  The Dutch attempted to settle Mauritius in the seventeenth century. They cut down the ebony forests and introduced sugar-cane. When the Dutch left—driven out, it is said, by rats—the French came. The French, mainly peasants from Brittany, stayed and continued to flourish after the British conquest in the early nineteenth century. They grew sugar-cane, depending for labour first on slaves from Madagascar and Africa, and then, when slavery was abolished, on indentured immigrants from India.

  Throughout the nineteenth century labour was short, and immigration from India continued until 1917, so that today Indians make up two-thirds of the population. Even with this immigration the population held steady. In 1931 the population was more or less what it had been in 1901, just under 400,000. Then the disaster occurred. In 1949 malaria was finally eradicated. The population jumped. It is now about 820,000. Three Mauritians out of five are under twenty-one. No one knows how many unemployed or idle people there are—estimates vary from 50,000 to 80,000—and the population grows by about 12,000 every year.

  The economy, and the social structure, is still that of an agricultural colony, a tiny part of an empire: the island has been independent for only three years. The large estates, the big commission agents and the sugar factories are white (though there are many Indian landowners and there is an Indian aristocracy of sorts); rural labour is Indian; mulattoes are civil servants; Negroes are artisans, dockworkers and fishermen; Chinese are in trade.

  Sugar remains the main crop and virtually the sole export. Sugar-cane covers nearly half the island, so that from the air this island of disaster looks empty and green, dotted with half-pyramids of stone that are like the relics of a vanished civilization. The stone comes from the sugar-cane fields: “de-stoning”—and the boulders are enormous—is a recurring task. Once the de-stoning was done by hand; now it is done by bulldozers. Sugar has always been an efficient industry, and in Mauritius the efficiency shows. Lushness has been abolished; order has been imposed on the tropical landscape. The visitor who keeps to the main highways sees an island as well-kept as a lawn, monotonous except for the jagged volcanic hills, miniature green Matterhorns.

  An island roughly oval in shape, 720 square miles in the Indian Ocean, far from anywhere, colonized, like those West Indian islands on the other side of the world, only for sugar, part of the great human engineering of recent empires, the shifting about of leaderless groups of conquered peoples: to the travel writers, who have set to work on Mauritius, the island is “a lost paradise” which is “being developed into an idyllic spot.” It is an island which the visitor leaves with “a feeling of peace.” To the Mauritian who cannot leave it is a prison: sugar-cane and sugarcane, ending in the sea, and the diseased coconut trees, blighted by the rhinoceros beetle.

  Twenty thousand tourists came to Mauritius last year. The lost paradise already has a casino, and the casino company, in tune with the holiday tastes of these low latitudes, has also put in fruit machines
in the island’s leading hotels. The tourists prefer the fruit machines. In the Park Hotel in Curepipe the fat women and their fatter girls start playing the machines after breakfast; in the late afternoon, when the television also blares, conversation in the lounge of this allegedly eighteenth-century building becomes impossible.

  The casino is patronized mainly by local Chinese, sitting as blank-faced here before the bright tables in the dark-red hall as they do behind their shop counters in the villages, having apparently only changed from khaki shorts and singlets into suits. The Chinese are a race apart in Mauritius, and impenetrable; it is a cause for awe that people can be so reckless with money which, in the Mauritian myth, they have made by such tedious treachery. In the myth, the Chinese shopkeeper spends a part of every working day extracting one or two matches from every box in his stock, so that out of, say, twenty boxes of matches he makes twenty-one and so picks up an extra quarter-penny of pure profit.

  The casino picks up more than quarter-pennies, and many Mauritians are pleased with the success and modernity of the place. I couldn’t find out what there was in the casino venture for the Mauritius Treasury or the tourist trade. To enquire was only to probe a kind of native innocence. But everyone knew that the casino employed a number of people and that the white and mulatto girls who operated the tables—their satiny old-fashioned evening-dress uniforms labelled with their first names—had until a few months before been idle and unemployed. Now, very quickly, they had acquired this difficult modern skill: in this “adaptability”—a recurring Mauritian word—lay the hope for the future. In Mauritius it always comes to this: jobs, employment, a use of the hands, something to do.

  The tourists come from the nearby French island of Réunion (technically a department of France), from Madagascar, England, India, and South Africa. Relations with South Africa are close. South Africa buys, at more than a fair price, every kilo of the somewhat flavourless tea that Mauritius produces; and to see what “Made in South Africa” looks like in Afrikaans, all you have to do is to turn over the ash-tray in your hotel room. Mauritius is no place for the anti-apartheid campaigner. Many French Mauritians have family or business links with South Africa; and during the period of French “over-reaction” before independence (“We always over-react here”)—when the French rallied their loyal Negroes (anti-apartheid people really should stay away from Mauritius) and there were rumours of a French–South African commando takeover—during this period of over-reaction a number of French people moved to South Africa.