The year after my mother died, I went back to England to school. It was not until I was seventeen that I returned to Africa on a visit. I had grown very like my father, tall and big-shouldered, and I did not have much difficulty in working my passage out as deckhand on a cargo boat.
Kwabena was at school in Takoradi, but he came home several times to see me. He had grown taller, although he was still a head shorter than I, and his lank child’s body had filled in and become stocky. Apart from that, to my unobservant eyes he was the same. I wonder now how I could have thought so. The indications were plain enough, had I not wanted to ignore them. I asked him to come with me to the palm grove one day, to look at the fetish huts. His face became guarded.
“I do not go there any more,” he said.
We passed a man planting cassava in a little field.
“They pour libation to make the crops good,” Kwabena commented, “and then work the land like that, by hand, with a hoe.”
We saw the District Commissioner one afternoon, his white topee gleaming. He was holding a formal palaver with the local chief.
“We will not always be slaves of the English,” Kwabena said. “That’s stupid,” I replied. “You’re not slaves now.”
“If they own us or own our country, where is the difference?”
“So they will have to go?”
“Yes,” he answered firmly. “They will have to go.”
“Splendid,” I said ironically. “And I with them? If I were here in government?”
He did not reply for a moment.
“Perhaps I would not wish it,” he said finally, carefully. “But there is a saying–follow your heart, and you perish.”
We did not talk of it again, and after a while I forgot.
Afua still lived with Yaa and Kwaku. I thought she had changed more than anyone. I see now that she had changed less than Kwabena, for the difference in her was one that life had brought about, easily, of itself. Her body gave the impression of incredible softness and at the same time a maternal strength. She belonged to earth, to her body’s love, to toil, to her unborn children. One evening, after Kwabena had gone back to Takoradi, I fulfilled the promise to myself and went to the palm grove. It was deserted, and the wind ruffled the tops of the trees like fingers through unruly hair. Afua walked quietly, and I did not hear her until she was very close. But she did not enter the grove.
“Why do you stand there?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Perhaps to hear the ancestors’ voices.”
“You must not.”
“Why?”
“Because it is a sacred place,” she answered simply, “and I am afraid.”
The beach was only a few yards away. We walked down there.
“You have grown very tall,” she smiled, and she placed one of her hands lightly on my wrist. Then she hesitated. “Are–are Englishmen like other men?”
I could not help laughing at that, and she laughed too, without self-consciousness or shame. Then, clumsily, I took her in my arms.
She was more experienced than I. I would not have blamed her if she had mocked me. But she did not. For her, it answered a question. Quite probably that is all. But for me it was something else. Possessing her, I possessed all earth. Afterwards, I told her that I had to go back to England soon. Perhaps I expected her to say she would be broken-hearted.
“Yes, it is right that you should return to your own land,” Afua said.
I was about to tell her that I would come back here, that I would see her again. But something stopped me.
It was the sudden memory of what Kwabena had said. “Follow your heart, and you perish.”
Of course I did go back to Africa after all, but not for another ten years. Africa had changed. The flame trees still scattered their embers of blossoms upon the hard earth. The surf boats still hurtled through the big waves. The market women’s mammy-cloths were as gaudy, their talk as ribald as ever. Yet nothing was the same.
The country was to have its independence the following year, but the quality of change was more than political. It was so many things. It was an old chieftain in a greasy and threadbare robe, with no retinue–only a small boy carrying aloft the red umbrella, ancient mark of aristocracy. It was an African nightclub called “Weekend in Wyoming”, and a mahogany-skinned girl wearing white face powder. It was parades of a new sort, buxom market women chanting “Free–dom!” It was the endless palaver of newborn trade unions, the mushroom sprouting of a dozen hand-set newspapers. It was an innuendo in the slogans painted on mammy-lorries–The Day Will Come, Life Is Needed, Authority Is Never Loved. It was the names of highlife bands–The Majestic Atoms, Scorpion Ansah And His Jet Boys. It was the advertisements in newspapers–“Take Tiger Liver Tonic for fitness, and see how fast you will be promoted at work.” It was the etiquette and lovelorn columns–“Is it proper for a young lady to wear high heels with traditional African dress?” or “I am engaged to a girl whose illiteracy is causing me great embarrassment–can you advise?”
The old Africa was dying, and I felt suddenly rootless, a stranger in the only land I could call home.
I drove up the coast to our old village one day to see Afua. I ought to have known better, but I did not. Afua is married to a fisherman, and they have so far four living children. Two died. Afua must have married very young. Her face is still handsome. Nothing could alter the beauty of those strong sweet bones–they will be the same when she is eighty. Yes, her face is beautiful. But that is all. Her body is old from work and child-bearing. African women suckle their children for a long time. Her breasts are old, ponderous, hanging. I suppose they are always full of milk. I did not mind that so much. That is the way of life here. No, I am wrong. I did mind. But that was not what I minded the most.
She came to the door of the hut, a slow smile on her lips. She looked questioningly at my car, then at me. When she saw who it was, she stopped smiling. Around her, the children nuzzled like little goats, and flies clung to the eyelids of the sleeping baby on her back. The hot still air was dogged with latrine stench and the heavy pungency of frying plantains.
“I greet you–master,” Afua said.
And in her eyes was the hatred, the mockery of all time.
I met Kwabena accidentally on the street in Accra. He had grown thinner and was dressed very neatly now in white shirt and grey flannels. He looked disconcertingly serious, but when he smiled it was the same grin and for a moment I thought it was going to be all right. But when I gave him the Twi greeting, he did not reply to it.
“So you have come back after all, Matthew,” he said finally.
“Yes, I’ve come back.” Perhaps my voice was more emphatic than I had intended. “This is where I belong.”
“I see.”
“Or perhaps you don’t think so–”
Kwabena laughed. Africans quite often laugh when they are not amused.
“What I think,” he commented, “should not matter to you.”
“For heaven’s sake, Kwabena,” I demanded, “what’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” he replied vaguely. Then, with a show of interest, “Well, are you with government, as you used to say you would be?”
“Yes. Administration. They’re not taking on new European staff any more–I only managed it because I speak Twi. And you?”
“Oh, I am a medical orderly.” His voice was bitter. “An elevated post.”
“Surely you could do better than that?”
“I have not your opportunities. It is the closest I can get now to real medical work. I’m trying to get a scholarship to England. We will see.”
“You want to be a doctor?”
“Yes–” He laughed in an oddly self-conscious way. “Not a ju-ju man, you understand.”
Suddenly, I thought I did understand. With me, he could never outgrow his past, the time when he had wanted to be another kind of doctor–a doctor who dealt in charms and amulets, in dried roots and yellow bones and bits of python skin. He
knew I would remember. How he must have regretted betraying himself to me when we were both young.
I wanted to tell him that I knew how far he had travelled from the palm hut. But I did not dare. He would have thought it condescension.
He was talking about his parents. Kwaku, he said, was working in Takoradi. He was getting old for domestic work, but he could not afford to retire. None of the sons or daughters had made or married money.
“And your mother?” I asked him.
“She died three years ago. She had hookworm for years. She was a Christian, as you know, but she still bought bushmattermatter medicine and charms instead of going to a doctor. I couldn’t persuade her. She became very weak. When she got typhoid she didn’t have much chance.”
For a moment I could not speak, could not believe that Yaa was really dead. It seemed wrong that I should learn of it this way, so long afterwards. And wrong, too, that I had thought of her these past years as unchanged, as though I had believed she would keep on during all my lifetime, shouting her flamboyant abuse to the sellers in the market, and gathering each successive generation of children into her arms.
“I–I didn’t know,” I stumbled. “No one told me–”
“Why should they tell you”–he smiled wryly–“if an old African woman dies?”
Pain and anger spread like a bloodstain over my whole mind.
“You know as well as I do,” I replied harshly, “that she was more mother to me than my own mother.”
Kwabena looked at me as though he hated me.
“Yes,” he said. “I shared my mother with you, in exchange for your cast-off khaki shorts.”
There was something in it that shocked both of us, and we were uncomfortably silent.
“I did not mean to say that,” Kwabena said finally, and there was shame in his voice, but no withdrawal.
I could not help thinking of the two boys who had both been born on a Tuesday, and of the woman, immense, bad-tempered, infinitely gentle, who had said, “You are brothers anyway.” I found I was not angry at Kwabena any more. It was no one’s fault that life had allowed us a time of illusion, and that the time was now past.
“Never mind.” I felt very tired. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What do you think of the country”–he seized on the first topic to hand, as Englishmen seize on the weather–“now that you’re back?”
“Mixed feelings,” I said. “Independence is the new fetish, and political parties are the new chieftains. I’m not sure that much is gained.”
“A chieftain in a Kente cloth–you prefer that to a politician in a business suit?”
Whatever subject we touched seemed to be wrong. But I no longer cared.
“Quite frankly, yes. I think it’s more genuine. I don’t see anything very clever in all this cheap copying of western ways.”
“So–” Kwabena said thoughtfully. “You would like us to remain forever living in thatch huts, pounding our drums and telling pretty stories about big spiders.”
I stared at him, hardly able to comprehend what he had said. “You forget,” he went on, “that the huts were rotten with sickness, and the tales made us forget an empty belly, and the drums told of our fear–always there was fear, fear, fear–making us pay out more and more to the fetish priest–”
He broke off and looked away. When he spoke again, it was calmly, almost coldly.
“That was one thing about your father. He did not like us–that is true. He did not understand us. And we did not like or understand him. Nearly everything he did was wrong. But at least he did not want us to stand still.”
“As I do?” The words dried my throat, for I had meant them as irony, but they had not come out that way.
Kwabena did not reply. Instead he looked elaborately at his watch, like a doctor dismissing a demanding patient.
“I must not keep you any longer,” he concluded. “Also, I have to be back at work by one o’clock.”
I did not see him again.
Since then very little has happened to me. I do my job adequately but not brilliantly. My post is to be given to an African soon.
I married on my last leave. My wife is slight and fair, quite good-looking. She does not like Africa much, and she is always telling me that the servants have no idea of cleanliness. I do not argue with her. Quite probably she is right. She is looking forward to the day when we will have a semi-detached house in England’s green and pleasant land.
And I? I thought of Kwabena’s words for a long time. He was right about me, I suppose. But I wonder if I can ever forgive him for it. No man wants to know that the love in him is sterile.
To reject the way of a lifetime is not easy. It must have been hard for Kwabena, and now in another way it is hard for me. But at last I know, although I shall never be able to admit it to him. It was only I who could afford to love the old Africa. Its enchantment had touched me, its suffering–never. Even my fright had stopped this side of pain. I had always been the dreamer who knew he could waken at will, the tourist who wanted antique quaintness to remain unchanged.
We were conquerors in Africa, we Europeans. Some despised her, that bedraggled queen we had unthroned, and some loved her for her still-raging magnificence, her old wisdom. But all of us sought to force our will upon her.
My father thought he was bringing Salvation to Africa. I do not any longer know what salvation is. I only know that one man cannot find it for another man, and one land cannot bring it to another.
Africa, old withered bones, mouldy splendour under a red umbrella, you will dance again, this time to a new song.
But for me it is different. Now the wind in the casuarina trees is only a wind. The drums at night are only men pounding on skins stretched over wood. The Drummer of all the world is gone. He no longer drums himself, for me. A spider is only an insect, and not the child of Ananse. A deserted hut on the shore is only a heap of mud and dried palm leaves. Death no longer keeps such a simple establishment.
I shall be leaving soon. Leaving the surf that stretches up long white fingers to clutch the brown land. The fetid village enclosed and darkened by a green sky of overhanging palm trees. The giant heartbeat of the night drums. The flame tree whose beauty is suddenly splendid–and short-lived–like the beauty of African women. The little girl dancing with her shadow in the stifling streets. The child sleeping, unmindful, while flies caress his eyes and mouth with the small bright wings of decay. The squalor, the exultation, the pain. I shall be leaving it all.
But–oh Kwabena, do you think I will ever forget?
THE PERFUME SEA
No question of it,” Mr. Archipelago said, delicately snipping a wisp of hair. “I am flotsam.”
“Not jetsam?” Mrs. Webley-Pryce asked, blinking sharply watchful eyes as the scissored shreds fell down onto her face. “I always get the two confused.”
Outside, the small town was growing sluggish under the sedative sun of late morning. The one-footed beggar who squatted beside Mr. Archipelago’s door had gone to sleep on the splintery wooden steps. Past the turquoise-and-red façade of Cowasjee’s Silk Bazaar, in the rancid and shadowy room, the shrivelled Parsee sat, only half awake, folding a length of sari cloth and letting the silk slip through his fingers as he dreamed of a town in India, no less ill-smelling and dirty than this African one, but filled with the faces and speech of home. At the shop of K. Tachie (General Merchant), Tachie himself sat beside his cash register, surrounded by boxes and barrels. Kinglike, he perched on a high stool and roared abuse at his court of counter-clerks, while at the same time he managed to gulp a lurid carbonated grape beverage called Doko-Doko. At the Africa Star Chemists, a young shopgirl dozed, propping her brown arms against a carton of Seven Seas codliver oil. Down the street, in the Paradise Chop-Bar, a young man recalled those arms as he sloshed a rag over the tables in preparation for the customers who would soon be lifting the striped bedspread that hung across the doorway and shouting for beer and kenkey. In the Government Agent’s offic
e, and in the offices of Bridgeford & Knight, Exporters-Importers, Englishmen sighed and wilted and saw from their watches that they could not yet legitimately leave for lunch. Pariah dogs on the road snarled over a cat corpse; then, panting, tongues dribbling, defeated by sun, they crawled back to a shaded corner, where their scabrous hides were fondled by an old man in a hashish dream. Footsteps on the cracked and scorching pavement lagged. Even the brisk shoes of white men slackened and slowed. The market women walked tiredly, their headtrays heavy, their bare feet pressing the warm dust into ripples and dunes. Babies slung on their mothers’ backs allowed their heads to loll forward and whimpered at the sweat that made sticky their faces. A donkey brayed disconsolately. Voices droned low. Laughter like melted honey poured slowly. Down by the shore, under a few scattered palm trees, the wives of fishermen drowsed over their net-mending. Only the children, the fire and gleam of them greater even than the harsh glint of sun, continued to leap and shout as before.
Mr. Archipelago riffled a comb through the winter straw of the lady’s hair, and nuzzled his rotundity against her arm for the lightly spiteful pleasure of feeling her recoil. He moved back a decent pace. Under his white smock, the red and gold brocade waistcoat quivered with his belly’s silent laughter.
“Flotsam, dear lady,” he said. “I looked it up in the Concise Oxford.”
On the other side of the room, Doree glanced up from the lustrous green with which she was enamelling the finger-nails of her thin white hands, knuckle-swollen from years of cleansing other women’s hair. Her mild myopic eyes were impressed, even awed. Her mouth, painted to emulate hardness, opened in a soft spontaneous astonishment.
“Can you beat it?” she said. “He looks up words all the time, and laughs like the dickens. I used to read the telephone book sometimes, in the nights, and wonder about those names and if they all belonged to real people, living somewhere, you know, and doing something. But I never laughed. What’d it say for flotsam, Archipelago?”