Journey to the Kenyan Highlands

Shiva Naipaul

The taxi which had been arranged for me by the District Commissioner was already more than fifteen minutes late. However, I did not worry unduly. 'You will get royal treatment,' my friend's wife had assured me. 'Remember it's the DC himself who fixed it up for you: If anything goes wrong and he makes a complaint, you can be sure that somebody somewhere will be out of a Job. Just one word from him and . . .' She Paused, smiled broadly and patted my wrist. 'Don't you worry about a thing. You Will be treated like a king.' She laughed Pleasantly.

I glanced at my watch (the taxi was now over twenty minutes late), thought of my kingly powers and was comforted. One telephone call from me to the DC and somebody somewhere . . . The prospect, as the Minutes ticked by and no taxi showed up, of throwing someone somewhere out of a Job became increasingly alluring. But I decided to exercise restraint. In any case, I was not at all certain that my complaint Would be well received. I harboured grave reservations about the DC's goodwill towards me. Across the road from the wide, glass-louvred veranda of the hotel red roofs Showed through the dark green foliage of What I took to be mango trees. Further on, could see a colourless arm of the lake. A canoe, hugging the line of the shore, was being poled slowly along it. Beyond the lake an olive-green plain faded into a rampart of bare hills. A wide-winged bird of prey soared through the blue depths of the sky. The iron silence of early afternoon had Closed in over the land.

Looking at the lake, the hills, the sky, one sensed the vastness and emptiness of the continent. Africa is not built on a human scale: stand on the edge of a plateau whose Sides rise sheer from a plain some three thousand feet below; gaze out over a tawny ocean of land dissolving in the misty distance to barely discernible mountain ranges, mere emanations of colour and line, that float mirage-like against a luminous sky; realise that in all that vertiginous expanse of space and light there is no sign of human habitation or handiwork. The beauty is awesome.

'Sit straight ! Just look at the mess you are Making! Your table manners really are a disgrace!'

I emerged from my reverie with a start. The English voice, clear, precise, confident, travelled down the length of the veranda. Turning, I saw its source: a handsome, sunbrowned woman, most of whose face was hidden behind a pair of dark glasses. Sitting beside her were two children. A benignly smiling man—presumably Daddy—corn

pleted the party. I listened as the woman, oblivious to everything, fussed, scolded and corrected. I had been in Africa for only a month but already such echoes from Western suburbia rang strangely in the ear, possessing an almost surreal quality. These lessons in table manners were touching— and faintly ridiculous; as touching and ridiculous as dressing for dinner in the middle of the jungle.

A motor-car horn blared in jarring, semimusical notes. I looked out and on the road below saw an ancient Peugeot stationwagon. Blazoned across its rear windscreen in garish lettering was the legend, 'Love You

Baby.' •

'Your taxi,' a waiter said.

I looked at him doubtfully. 'There must be some mistake,' I said. 'The DC himself arranged ...'

He regarded me coldly. The horn blared again.

'That is your taxi,' the waiter said.

Surely the DC could not have had a vehicle like this in mind. That thing standing outside the hotel was nothing but a matatua pirate taxi—of the lowest order. They were notorious for their gross overloading; their mechanical defects; their unlicensed drivers. Scores of people were killed annually by matatus. Surely . . Once again the horn blared. The driver screeched impatiently from the roadway. I gathered up my bags and hurried out of the hotel. My kingly status had melted away with alarming suddenness. High up in the blue sky the bird of prey soared with serene confidence.

The driver seized my bags and tossed them into the rear of the station-wagon without ceremony. Raucous music raged from a cassette machine ensconced in the dashboard. By now my ear could recognise without difficulty the deadly harmonies of Zairean pop music—then enjoying a great vogue in Kenya.

'Listen,' I said, trying to make myself heard above the uproar. 'Listen ... Did the DC arrange for this ear'?'

He stared at me with sullen incomprehension.

'The DC,' I shouted. 'The District Commissioner. Are you sure this was the car he arranged for?'

He continued to stare at me, sullenness turning to irritation. Finally, he muttered words in a strange language and, shrugging, got into his seat and slammed the door. It was an ultimatum, 'Can't you speak English ?' I shouted.

He started the engine. I got in. He indicated that I was to sit in the back row. I climbed over the middle seat and huddled despairingly against a window. Africans tend to drive either dangerously fast—or dangerously slowly. This one drove dangerously fast, horn ceaselessly sounding; and, all the while, the Zairean music poured forth at top volume. It was the noisiest vehicle I had ever travelled in. Driving in Africa is high adventure. It is impossible to tell what your driver or the driver of the car ahead—or behind—will, from moment to moment, decide to do: for no apparent reason any or all of these might take it into their heads to switch lanes; or stop without warning in the middle of the road to have a chat with a friend; or suddenly accelerate and overtake on an inside lane or blind corner or steep rise where the oncoming traffic is an unknown quantity. (Pedestrians too are unpredictable. Without even a cursory glance to right or left, they will turn and walk calmly across the road.) The roadsides of East Africa are littered with the rusting remains of motor-cars, buses and lorries. On a recent drive from Mombasa to Nairobi I counted no fewer than four freshly overturned lorries.

The African's relationship to modern technology is a problematical one. He falls on it with childish, uncaring zest—no bank clerk will deign to perform the simplest arithmetic without resort to his little electronic calculator which lights up so prettily whenever he presses one of its buttons. The world represented by that electronic calculator is a magical one; little understood, but greatly—oh so greatly !—desired. In its essence, the nature of the ties linking the African with the European has not really changed since the first Portuguese ships went sailing down the west coast of the continent : the sophisticated magic of the white man remains irresistibly alluring to the black. The African did not, in any fundamental sense, want to know how to make the glittering baubles which the white man dangled before him during the early centuries of contact. He was content with simple possession. To achieve that end he was prepared to sell anything on which the Europeans cared to put a price. One aspect of the contemporary black tragedy is that the desire simply to possess remains uppermost in the mind of the African. He is content to appear modern rather than he modern; he opts for the shadow and not the substance. The skyscrapers of Nairobi symbolise nothing more than the power of selfdelusion. Between black and white the gap of civilisation has, if anything, widened over the centuries. No aid project devised on earth—or in heaven—can ever lessen the terrifying gap of intellect between a race of men who can land on the moon and another who, if left entirely to themselves, would,

in all probability, be unable to manufacture a bicycle pump.

'But what can you expect from people who have just emerged from the jungle ?' The Nairobi-based entrepreneur spread his arms wide and smiled resignedly. 'Be realistic. Some of our friends here are less than a generation removed from the jungle. What can you expect from them ?' From the story he had just told me I knew he had personal reasons for bitterness. Not all that long ago his engineering firm had been awarded a contract by one of the major state-owned organisations. To begin with he had had an Asian workforce. The job had been completed in record time; the workmanship was of a high standard; everyone had been full of praise. As a result, he had been given a new contract. But then had come the first expulsions of the Asians. Virtually overnight his workforce evaporated. To keep in line with the policy of Kenyanisation he was •forced to employ Africans in their place; and virtually overnight the quality of the work dropped drastically. Their laziness was the least of their faults.

The entrepreneur shook his head. 'You can take it from me that Africans don't know about straight lines. They just don't seem able to grasp the concept of a straight line.' Metal plates were bent and twisted one on top the other; every screw was awry. 'You must understand these weren't people I had picked up off the street. They were "qualified." They could show you their certificates.' He had sacked them all and had himself physically completed the job, working day and night. 'Look at me. I'm not a young man. My hair is grey. Do you know they wanted to give me another contract ? "Thank you very much," I said, "but you can keep your contract. I've had enough. You can get in touch with my competitors." The only thing you can do with our friends is to give them a nice chair, give them a nice-sounding title and put them in a position where they can do least harm.' Beyond the windows of the restaurant where we were sitting the lights of Nairobi twinkled with Manhattanesque self-assurance.

Was he exaggerating ? Perhaps. Stories of African conceptual incapacity have acquired something of the abstract quality of fable. There is a famous one about wheelbarrows. One version of the story goes something like this. Some Africans are building a road. Their European adviser watches them running to and fro carrying basketsful of stone on their heads. They are quickly exhausted and have to take frequent rests. He goes away and returns with a wheelbarrow. He explains its advantages— the physical effort required is considerably less, the load that can be carried much greater and so on. Do they understand ? 'Yes sah ! Yes sah!' Dozens of wheelbarrows are supplied. Some days later his foreman comes to him in a state of great agitation. The workers, he reports, are on the verge of complete physical collapse. Naturally

enough, the European adviser is astonished. 'But that is impossible. I gave them wheelbarrows!' He rushes off to the site to see what is happening. And what does he find when he gets there ? (At this point the eyes of the story-teller usually light up merrily.) He finds that the African workers have been trying to carry the fully loaded wheelbarrows on their heads. Get that ? On their heads! Imagine all those darkies (they never managed to invent the wheel, you know) lifting up their wheelbarrows and.., and ... There follows explosion after explosion of helpless laughter.

This story, varying in its detail, was told to me by a number of people each of whom swore that it was absolutely true. One even claimed to be a good friend of the 'European adviser' involved. All I can say is that I have seen Africans handling wheelbarrows in a perfectly normal manner. I consigned the story to the realms of racist apocrypha. Nevertheless, not many weeks ago a small news item on the back page of the Daily Nation made me pause. It told the tale of three African workers who had incinerated themselves while attempting to weld a petrol tank that was full of petrol.

'People [from Europe] go to Africa,' Elspeth Huxley wrote in 1943, 'and they see Africans living in away which appears to them . . . shocking in its lack of scope, its ignorance and simplicity. They do not always stop to consider that you can't convert in the space of forty years a people living at an early Iron Age level of culture.. to to a level achieved after two thousand years of civilisation, and after the Industrial Revolution.' Elspeth Huxley is not a 'liberal' in the current sense of that term. But in this passage she espouses a type of argument commonly to be met with among those Europeans in Africa—mainly expatriates on twoor three-year contracts— who, out of blind ideological or sentimental conviction, and despite all evidence to the contrary, refuse to despair about the future of the dark continent. There are two points I would like to make.; and make, alas, all too briefly. The first is that Africans—not all certainly, but a significant number—have been exposed to European influences for almost four centuries; and, on the East Coast, they have had contacts with the great civilisations of the Middle East and India for a thousand years or more. Challenge has not provoked response—as it did, say, in the case of the Japanese when they were confronted by the superior technical skills of the West. The second point, not unconnected with the first, is the near-magical transforming qualities the liberal attributes to 'Time.' Give them time' is the phrase one

hears again and again in Africa. But Time is an entirely neutral element. By itself it guarantees nothing. It is the actions of men that matter. Neither Time nor the most altruistic breed of expatriates will ever be able to 'convert' the underdeveloped peoples of the earth; or instil into them the passionate energies that result in creation. How do you teach a man to cling to the substance and not the shadow ? Conversion can only come from within. Without the will to create, without the lifesaving vision of his own autonomous manhood, the African will never find his way.

We drove to the bus-station which was crowded, dirty, noisy and hot. The driver moved energetically among the throng touting for custom. A young girl with a baby settled beside me; the place next to her was taken by a man in bright yellow trousers carrying an enormous transistor radio—the type of transistor radio one only sees in the underdeveloped world. Gradually the middle row filled up. A fat, voluble woman took possession of the seat beside the driver. Pumpkins, bags of grain, live poultry, a mattress, were stowed away on the roof and behind the back seat. Already we had exceeded the legal quota by two, but the driver continued to tout for more passengers. The middle row emptied, the seat was pushed forward. I watched with alarm as, somehow, a woman managed to squeeze in next to the man with yellow trousers. That meant there were nine of us. Another passenger was found for the middle row. Ten. A slim girl joined the fat woman sitting up front. Eleven. The middle row emptied again. A boy dressed in short khaki trousers and a green shirt appeared out of nowhere. Without a word or a glance he placed himself on my lap. Twelve. When next I looked a third passenger had been able to insinuate himself up front. Thirteen —or fourteen if the baby was included. I examined the boy who sat very still and tranquil on my lap. He was very black, with the bloom of grape on his black skin. The man in the yellow trousers began tuning up his transistor ; the Zairean music raged unabated from the dashboard. Somewhere a hen fluttered and squawked. I could hardly breathe.

'Look here,' I shouted when the driver reappeared. 'What's this damned boy doing on my lap ?'

The boy turned to look at me. I glared at him ferociously. His large, black eyes regarded me with a kind of bewildered wonder. I wilted under their gaze, embarrassed and a little ashamed of myself.

'You want to throw him out ?' someone inquired from the middle row. There was accusation in the tone.

I was aware of the boy's eyes fixed on me. He was very still.

'You want to throw him out ?'

I shook my head.

'Now we go,' the driver said in an unexpected burst of English. We lurched out of the bus-station, horn blaring.

I was on my way to the Highlands.