The Masque Of Africa Part 11

He was nevertheless punctilious about thanking people in the village for what they had done. The afternoon had been his show; he felt the failure keenly.

In the car, going back, we talked some more about initiation. He said his wife had done the special woman's initiation, but there were things in it they couldn't talk about.

What things? Sorcery?

He said, "I believe that there are people who use their negative energy to harm people. Negative emotions do harm. Sometimes they use material objects to make sure that the harm is done. It begins with meditation, and people will call it black arts, but I would not call it that because that is racist."

"Have you talked about this to other people? Your parents?"

"Part of the spiritual path is enlightening others, but not in an evangelical way. As for my parents, I did try, but it did not work. I do films and I show them in the USA. My parents are in the audience and they have not asked me any questions. So I will wait until the time is ripe."

"Do you think you will lose your spiritual life in the USA?"

"No. That is inside me. What I will miss is the forest, and the leaves, and the ritual sides of the ceremony. They are very important. I have to go back for a better future for my children, but I want them to have a taste of their mother's country. Gabon has been part of my destiny, but I don't know the whole story yet."

"What do you feel about the forest now?"

"I always knew that plants were living beings, but now I know that they are conscious beings. They have spirits, and there is so much diversity in them. They have special and many chemical properties that can be used if we talk to them. I know that if you a.n.a.lyse all the plants of Gabon you cannot activate the healing process unless you know the language of the plants. To know that language you have to know the religion that comes with initiation."

9.

ON THE way back to Libreville we stopped at Lambarene, the place connected with Dr. Schweitzer. We had gone from Libreville to Lope by train and we were coming back by helicopter, courtesy of the army and the minister of defence. way back to Libreville we stopped at Lambarene, the place connected with Dr. Schweitzer. We had gone from Libreville to Lope by train and we were coming back by helicopter, courtesy of the army and the minister of defence.

Until I had got to Gabon I had not a.s.sociated the country with Dr. Schweitzer. When I thought about him I had thought of a vague tropical African s.p.a.ce. Now it was here, next to the helicopter landing ground, and my first thought was of the overwhelmingness of water and heat, the nearness to nothing that was close to one, and how hard it would be to spend the best part of one's middle life here. Lambarene was a narrow island, some fifteen miles long, in the Oguwe River. After the disturbance of the helicopter blade, sending dust noisily into the nearby bush, there was, as it seemed to me, something like the equivalent disturbance of the official welcome. Everyone welcoming the guest of the minister of defence seemed touched by the urgency of the helicopter; everyone-the representatives of different layers of local government, the officials of the Schweitzer hospital-seemed anxious to say what he had to say right off. It made for some breathless moments. I had been hoping for a period of quiet in which I might expose myself to the genius of the place (using that word in its cla.s.sical sense), letting the place speak for itself, and arriving through that at some private idea of the man we had come to honour.

It wasn't like that. The place felt cleansed of the presence of Dr. Schweitzer, in spite of the long low-eaved hospital building, with the two rooms at one end that had been the doctor's. There was a lackl.u.s.tre piano (the second of the two pianos that the doctor had had sent out to Lambarene, we were told), with opened sheet music unnecessarily in place (for the actuality, no doubt) forty-four years after the doctor's death, the exposed music sheet brown from the harsh light of the broad Oguwe. There was a bookcase with some of the doctor's books: not books he had owned and read, but Asian translations (for which no true home had been found) of some of the doctor's own books, part of the unimportant detritus of a writer's life. In the next room was the doctor's narrow bed with a mosquito curtain. On a table were technical-looking relics, including a microscope. There were photographs, not easy to look at. It was possible that the real relics were elsewhere, and we were looking only at things that could be spared.

When I was a boy in Trinidad, on the other side of the Atlantic, I used to think that the light and heat had burned away the history of the place. You couldn't feel that bush or sea had a history. To have a sense of history you needed buildings, architecture; and history came to the place-you seemed to see the change occurring-in Marine Square in the centre of the old Spanish town, and the few ambitious buildings of the British period. Here at Lambarene there was no architecture, only nondescript tropical buildings, in ochre-coloured distemper, of no distinctive style, that seemed to have eaten up the past.

While we looked, the young woman who was the official guide recited the dates of Dr. Schweitzer's life: it was part of the continuing hubbub of our welcome.

In spite of that microscope on the table it was well known that Dr. Schweitzer was more of a missionary than a doctor. The medical degree he had taken was the abridged one missionaries took; so that in Africa he was a little like the barefoot doctors the Chinese created for China much later in the century. When he and Lambarene became famous more qualified doctors came out, attracted by the idea of service which he appeared to exemplify.

Dr. Schweitzer came out to Gabon in 1915. The French colony had been established more than sixty years before, and missionary activity, both American and French, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic, had been going on for almost all that time.

The English traveller Mary Kingsley came to Gabon in 1893 and 1895. Her famous book, Travels in West Africa Travels in West Africa, was published by the house of Macmillan in 1897. (This was the year in which Somerset Maugham published his first novel: it gives a kind of context).

Mary Kingsley describes a busy river life in Gabon, with traders and missionaries. Dr. Schweitzer, when he came to Gabon twenty years later, in 1915, would not have had to live the life of Robinson Crusoe. Mission life by this time would already have been formalised. African children would have been trained in housework; the missionary whose energy was low needed only conduct a service in his church, which might be next door to his house.

Mary Kingsley writes especially about Dr. Na.s.sau, a very early missionary from the American Presbyterian mission. He had been working among Africans for forty years when Mary Kingsley met him. She is full of praise for him; and he is clearly an unusual man, of high intellect, full of energy, and wise about the ways and beliefs of Africans. The subject of African religion interests Mary Kingsley, too. She consults Dr. Na.s.sau at length about what she calls "fetish," which is her portmanteau word for African belief, and she gives the subject five chapters in her book, a hundred pages.

Set beside Mary Kingsley and Dr. Na.s.sau, Dr. Schweitzer doesn't s.h.i.+ne. Among Africans his reputation, which has lasted down to our own time, is that of a man who was "harsh" to Africans and was not interested in their culture. This perhaps is the true mystery of the man: not his ability in 1915 to turn his back on the civilisation of the time (though the 1914 war might have been a factor), but the-almost heroic-idea of his own righteousness that enabled him to live apart in Africa for all that time: the ideal of the missionary taken to its limit, the man less interested in serving men than in beguiling them.

Early on her travels Mary Kingsley saw the ruins of the first mission house Dr. Na.s.sau built on the upper Oguwe. It was on one side of a ravine, and in front of it, "as an ill.u.s.tration of the transitory nature of European life in West Africa," was the grave of Mrs. Na.s.sau. The four or five lines about this-the ruined mission house above the grave-make a telling point about dedication and loss and the swift growth of bush.

Quite different is the cl.u.s.ter of granite crosses beside the Lambarene hospital building. The crosses are close together. They seem not to leave room for anyone else. These are the Schweitzer family graves. They speak more of possession and triumph than tragedy. Nearby is a caged, depressed-looking pelican, padding about on trampled mud. Dr. Schweitzer had a pet pelican; and this unhappy pelican, flying nowhere, diving nowhere, is kept in his memory.

It became time to get back on the helicopter and leave. Some schoolchildren had been mustered in the afternoon sun for this farewell, and there were photographers. The boy closest to me, living deep in his imagination, blind to everything else, began to shadow-box for the photographers, and they, not seeing him, clicked away.

CHAPTER 6.

Private Monuments, Private Wastelands.

IT WAS the South African winter. In the high land around Johannesburg the air was dry and the gra.s.s was brown; outside the airport the jacaranda trees (as they had been identified to me) had turned yellow. Nothing of tropical Africa here, it seemed; the colours were like the winter-bitten colours of places far to the north, Iran, perhaps, or Castile. The straight lines of the industrial buildings on the way to the great city belonged to a culture of science and money, the style of another continent, another civilisation. The African workers at the roadside, at first exotic in this setting, gradually began to fit (though the extraordinary light gave a deeper tint and an extra s.h.i.+ne to their blackness). the South African winter. In the high land around Johannesburg the air was dry and the gra.s.s was brown; outside the airport the jacaranda trees (as they had been identified to me) had turned yellow. Nothing of tropical Africa here, it seemed; the colours were like the winter-bitten colours of places far to the north, Iran, perhaps, or Castile. The straight lines of the industrial buildings on the way to the great city belonged to a culture of science and money, the style of another continent, another civilisation. The African workers at the roadside, at first exotic in this setting, gradually began to fit (though the extraordinary light gave a deeper tint and an extra s.h.i.+ne to their blackness).

Two days later, in central Johannesburg, I saw what had befallen a section of the post-apartheid town. The white people, nervous of what the end of apartheid was going to bring, had left, just like that, and Africans had moved in, not local people, but footloose people from the countries round about, Mozambique, Somalia, the Congo and Zimbabwe. The government of free South Africa, in a fit of African-ness, had thrown open its borders to these people, and they were living in their own way in this corner of the too big and too solid and unyielding city: reducing great buildings and great highways to slum, or at any rate to a kind of half-life, in a way that would have been hard to imagine while the buildings served their original purpose. At road level solid gla.s.s panes had been kicked in, and all the way up an office block (or perhaps an apartment block) there were lines of poor was.h.i.+ng.

It is a saying of the extraordinary South African writer Rian Malan (born 1954), seeking always without rhetoric or falsity, and in an almost religious way, for an illumination to the racial pain of his country, that in Africa the white people built themselves a moonbase for their civilisation; when that crumbles there is nothing for black or white.

Forty years before, in Rwanda, on the sh.o.r.e of Lake Kivu, I had seen a much simpler Belgian holiday settlement surrendered to forest and people of the forest. The forest people, welcoming ready-made roof and walls and solid floors, ready-made shelter, had moved in, but had then grown unhappy: they didn't like the rectangular s.p.a.ces of the Belgian houses, and they had sought gradually to shrink these s.p.a.ces to the more familiar circular s.p.a.ces of their huts. Some years later, in the Congo itself, I had seen whole residential areas of the town once called Stanleyville, now called Kisangani, swallowed up by forest, with here and there a bleached signboard from its earlier life showing (though the plan of the streets had already become indecipherable).

This area of Johannesburg, speaking of science, style and architecture (speaking as much of learning and dedication as the mysterious textbook Joseph Conrad found in a hut on the bank of the Congo), had the effect on me of the bush of Kisangani. It sent my mind back to other places of dereliction and ruin I had seen: the wartime rubble of East Berlin kept as a monument in the communist days. But it seemed easier even in the bad days for that part of East Berlin to be rebuilt than it would be for the half-life of this part of Johannesburg to be restored to something like its original meaning. Where would one begin? One would have to begin with the idea of the city, the idea of civilisation; and already, before one had even begun, one would be swamped by protest.

There were further discoveries to be made within that new slum. A st.u.r.dy old warehouse had been given over to new merchandise, which would have been like a parody of what had been here. It was a market of witchdoctors' goods, and it was extensive. These were the muti muti goods that witchdoctors required their customers to get, to be used by the witchdoctor as he pleased, usually to make medicines, which the unfortunate bewitched man or woman had to drink. The least offensive of these magical goods were the wreaths of herbs which could be used to fumigate a room or house to make life uncomfortable for a bad spirit. Higher up in the scale of seriousness were roots with earth clinging to them; perhaps they were used for purges: the purge is a recurring theme of African magic. goods that witchdoctors required their customers to get, to be used by the witchdoctor as he pleased, usually to make medicines, which the unfortunate bewitched man or woman had to drink. The least offensive of these magical goods were the wreaths of herbs which could be used to fumigate a room or house to make life uncomfortable for a bad spirit. Higher up in the scale of seriousness were roots with earth clinging to them; perhaps they were used for purges: the purge is a recurring theme of African magic.

And then we were in the realm of awfulness: animal body parts laid out neatly on a kind of platform. The hawker was sitting on a low stool beside his goods. The goods themselves were stored in the market; people like the hawker didn't have to drag everything away at the end of the day and bring it all back in the morning; munic.i.p.al regulation helped the muti muti market. He was a skilled hand at arranging this kind of display, our hawker; he could set disparate things side by side, a jaw, a rib, and make them appear to be related or part of a series. In the top left-hand corner of his display were three horse heads with fur still on the heads, suggesting that these pieces, given pride of place among his goods (and clearly precious), had at one time come fresh from the slaughter-house. They would not have been easy to come by. A most grievous kind of bewitching would have lain on the man who had been asked by the witchdoctor to go and get a horse head. It would have been an expensive piece of magic. (But perhaps not as expensive as the white woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s that, according to the police, someone had been offering as market. He was a skilled hand at arranging this kind of display, our hawker; he could set disparate things side by side, a jaw, a rib, and make them appear to be related or part of a series. In the top left-hand corner of his display were three horse heads with fur still on the heads, suggesting that these pieces, given pride of place among his goods (and clearly precious), had at one time come fresh from the slaughter-house. They would not have been easy to come by. A most grievous kind of bewitching would have lain on the man who had been asked by the witchdoctor to go and get a horse head. It would have been an expensive piece of magic. (But perhaps not as expensive as the white woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s that, according to the police, someone had been offering as muti muti.) I would have liked to get a price for the horse head, but I was nervous of asking. I had asked many questions already and had exhausted my credit with the hawker. He was beginning to look cantankerous. He was proud of his stock and the way he laid it out. Every day he would have had idlers like me, visitors, tourists, coming and asking about the purpose of this and that, without any intention of buying, just wasting a dealer's time, and expecting to be taken seriously.

In addition to the horse heads there were a number of heads of deer, split down the middle with a single blow from a sharp knife or axe, the way in a cocoa estate, at harvest time, a cocoa pod, held in the left hand, might be split by a machete held in the right. The neatness and speed were necessary so that the brain of the poor animal could be taken away from the cranium and hawked about; and it was done so quickly that the thin-muzzled heads were still dainty and undamaged, and could be offered for sale in the market, with eyes that continued to look alive and interested and unafraid.

The smell was abominable. In addition to body parts spread out flat on the hawker's platform there were stomach parts that were hung out on display lines, like pieces of fabric, so that the expert in body parts might choose or examine what he wanted. These display parts were white or whitish, without colour; they had gathered dust.

The hawker had two guinea pigs in a cage. They were tormented by the smell of death and huddled together, finding a fleeting comfort in the warmth and life of the other. The hawker, noticing my worry, called out that they were his pets. It was his joke. The guinea pigs, when they were sold, would be ritually slaughtered, with a knife to the heart, very painful, but the favoured way, and their fresh blood drunk, at the witchdoctor's direction, part of the sacrifice.

I thought it all awful, a great disappointment. The people of South Africa had had a big struggle. I expected that a big struggle would have created bigger people, people whose magical practices might point the way ahead to something profounder. It was impossible for any rational person to feel that any virtue could come from the remains of these poor animals. As it was impossible later to feel that any succour the local diviners offered could put right the great hurt that the big city and its ancillary too-stringent towns.h.i.+ps inflicted on the people who lived in them. There was nothing here of the beauty I had found in Nigeria among the Yoruba people, with their cult, as it seemed to me, of the natural world; nothing here like the Gabonese idea of energy which was linked to the idea and wonder of the mighty forests. Here was only the simplest kind of magic which ended with itself, and from which nothing could grow.

Yet only a couple of hours before, at the Apartheid Museum, I had been dealing with another kind of African pain. The two Africas were separate; I could not bring them together. That was how it was here when you began to look: you swung from one Africa to another. And moving in this way from one set of ideas to another, you came to a feeling that its politics and history had conspired to make the people of South Africa simple.

Not far away from the muti muti-market was the street of diviners. s.p.a.ces were very small; the counter and the bench for customers took up most of the consulting room. In the first shop there was a very thin woman who had come to get some medicine for her baby girl-clearly some trouble with AIDS, but I didn't want to ask. She gave the healer a hundred rand and the healer came back very soon with forty rand and some herb or herb dust in a piece of newspaper, with which the thin woman was pathetically pleased, thinking she had bought health for her baby. Across the road was another consulting room. s.p.a.ce again was a problem, and it was dark. There were two candlesticks. The diviner squatted low, made us throw bones, just as we had done some months before in Nigeria, in a s.p.a.ce just as cramped, and she interpreted the signs for us.

Police cars were parked outside. Our driver went and talked to them. He said when he came back that the police were on the track of dangerous criminals and they had come here hoping to get protective muti muti.

2.

IN THE Apartheid Museum one wall was engraved with the names of some of the repressive racial acts that had helped to keep the state in order. There was no longer apartheid, but it had lasted long enough-thirty-six years-for people to be made by the intrusive laws. Fatima, our guide and arranger, had been made by the laws. Someone less remarkable would have been crushed. Fatima had literary ambitions; this idea of n.o.bility helped her to keep her soul. She also had an idea of other cultures outside-in the beginning she dreamed of the Islamic world-and though this Islamic dream was misguided, it also in the end helped her. Apartheid Museum one wall was engraved with the names of some of the repressive racial acts that had helped to keep the state in order. There was no longer apartheid, but it had lasted long enough-thirty-six years-for people to be made by the intrusive laws. Fatima, our guide and arranger, had been made by the laws. Someone less remarkable would have been crushed. Fatima had literary ambitions; this idea of n.o.bility helped her to keep her soul. She also had an idea of other cultures outside-in the beginning she dreamed of the Islamic world-and though this Islamic dream was misguided, it also in the end helped her.

She told us when we met that she was "coloured." This was a South African word, it could mean someone of mixed race in a purely descriptive way. It had another meaning as well, and then it was loaded with unspoken insult. It came from the remote past and it implied that an ancestor was a Bushman: the equivalent here of what a pigmy was in Gabon, physically negligible, but also to be considered the first man, full of wisdom about trees and plants and poisons. In the "Origins Centre" at Wit.w.a.tersrand University they endlessly ran short films (scratchy and loud from being run over and over again) about Bushmen singing and dancing and hunting the magnificent eland, which they poisoned and killed in a terrible way.

On her mother's side there was a great-grandfather who was English. Her great-grandmother was Xhosa. She claimed to be of mixed race (already the fantasy created by apartheid legislation), but Fatima saw photographs of the lady and thought she was very much a Xhosa woman. Fatima's paternal grandfather was very black, but the family spoke Afrikaans and hated dark skin; and when Fatima went to visit them they took her to the hairdresser and had the kinks in her wiry hair straightened out so that she could look white.

So she grew up as "just a coloured girl," without any ident.i.ty. The Xhosa girls at school all had ident.i.ties, and she had nothing. She grew up in a coloured community. She had Muslim neighbours and she saw they had feasts and rituals and a complete Muslim ident.i.ty; and it was no doubt to grasp at this ident.i.ty that when she was twenty she married a Muslim cleric. She was very pleased to have done that, feeding off the religion from the source, as it were. She began to "cover up"; she started with a head scarf, and soon she was all covered, except for the face and hands. She did this on her own, but then her husband made more and more demands. He didn't like her sitting in taxis with other men; he didn't like her shaking hands with them. He threatened to divorce her. Her job as a reporter became impossible; her dream of an Islamic ident.i.ty fell to the ground. It had already taken a knock when she went to Durban and tried to attach herself to the Indian community there. They weren't easy; they wanted to know her family name, her village; invariably, at the end of this inquisition, when they understood that she was coloured, they dropped her. She read a lot about Islam; she got to know more than the Indians and Muslims who quizzed her; it didn't help. She went on the pilgrimage to Mecca, but felt nothing; she saw only the restrictions on her as a woman.

She began to look then for a black ident.i.ty, but it was hard. Her coloured background again got in the way; the blacks rejected her as someone without a country or culture. So the whole South African journey for her was a discovery of pain: from her coloured beginnings to the Islamic dream, to the Indians of Durban, to the blacks of the towns.h.i.+ps. There were towns.h.i.+ps in Durban but they were near the airport and she didn't see them. She saw them properly only when she came to Johannesburg and began to work with the blacks. It was only then that she understood the great pain and, with that, the deception, for Africans, of political freedom and the end of apartheid.

Fatima said, "I see that the blacks here reach out more than the white South Africans. They, the whites, want the blacks to be 'there,' not near them. They cannot reach out or forgive, and they want a distance from the black. They are full of preconceived ideas, like Soweto is dangerous and that a black boy friend is bad."

I had wanted, when I began this book, to stay away from politics and race, to look below those themes for the core of African belief. But rather like Fatima looking for ident.i.ty, I felt stymied in South Africa and saw that here race was all in all; that race ran as deep as religion elsewhere.

3.

THE A APARTHEID M MUSEUM was my introduction to the South African idea of the monument. I found it moving; but there was something grander at the end of the Johannesburg-Pretoria road. This was the Afrikaner monument celebrating the Great Trek of the Boers from the Cape Colony to the interior in the first half of the nineteenth century. They trekked to be free of the British. They took all their goods and animals with them; and they went with ox-carts. It would have been slow and hard. The trekkers didn't always know what they were up against. The Africans were unfriendly; many of the trekkers died. Fatima, at school, had to study the Great Trek; all the skirmishes on the way became battles, and all these battles had to be committed to memory. Yet, in a further twist of cruelty, she was not permitted to visit the monument. was my introduction to the South African idea of the monument. I found it moving; but there was something grander at the end of the Johannesburg-Pretoria road. This was the Afrikaner monument celebrating the Great Trek of the Boers from the Cape Colony to the interior in the first half of the nineteenth century. They trekked to be free of the British. They took all their goods and animals with them; and they went with ox-carts. It would have been slow and hard. The trekkers didn't always know what they were up against. The Africans were unfriendly; many of the trekkers died. Fatima, at school, had to study the Great Trek; all the skirmishes on the way became battles, and all these battles had to be committed to memory. Yet, in a further twist of cruelty, she was not permitted to visit the monument.

The monument, which is of brown granite, is at the top of a hill. From the road it shows as a b.u.mp on the hill. Nothing free standing, no heroic, larger-than-life sculpture. You approach it from the garden at the back, looking up to its great height, and you climb up to the main level. At the entrance there is a green bronze statue of a stern woman, larger than life, her head covered, protecting two clinging children. This is a strange sentimental touch, out of keeping with the 1930s Germanic weight of the monument, which (like so many art-deco buildings) is a little like a magnified 1930s radio or radiogram. There is a symbolic perimeter wall here which seems to protect the monument. It is made up of a circular laager of sixty-four ox-carts done in low relief. The number is important. That number of ox-carts made up the laager when the trekkers were attacked by the Zulus on 16 December 1838. The Zulus were badly defeated, and it is that victory, of Blood River, that the monument celebrates.

Inside, past the teak door, the monument is circular and cool and beautiful, lit by four tall arched windows, one on each side. Within four uprights these windows have granite mullions that, strangely, create an Islamic pattern. At eye-level, on the circular wall, are twenty-seven sculptured plaques in low relief marking the stations and defeats and victories of the Trek. It should be said at once that the Africans in these sculptures are not caricatured. They are shown nude, more or less, and for that reason look more heroic than the Trekkers, who are in full nineteenth-century clothes, which do not work as well in sculpture as nude bodies do.

All this would be impressive, but there is more. Below the floor of the main hall there are further levels where artefacts connected with the Trek are displayed. Work on the monument was inaugurated on 16 December 1938, the centenary of the battle of Blood River, and the monument was formally opened, in the presence of a crowd of 250,000, on 16 December 1949 by D. F. Malan, in the first full year of the apartheid policy he and his Nationalist government had laid down for South Africa. It was an Afrikaner monument, a monument of African defeat, and it is easy to understand why Fatima and people like her were not allowed to visit the monument.

The architect, Gerard Moerdijk, said he had built a monument that would last a thousand years. He should have been more careful. It is too easy in a place as fragmented as South Africa to see what one wants to see and to commit oneself to building on sand. Times of course have changed. Moerdijk's Afrikaner monument has become a national monument, part of the national patrimony, and is allowed to live on. But no one can really be sure what the future will bring.

4.

RIAN M MALAN introduced me to the writing of the Afrikaner writer Herman Charles Bosman. Just before I left he gave me a copy of introduced me to the writing of the Afrikaner writer Herman Charles Bosman. Just before I left he gave me a copy of Mafeking Road Mafeking Road, one of the writer's four collections of stories. It was a South African publication and gave no indication of the writer's career and dates. I felt as a result that I was reading blind. I had only a quote from Roy Campbell to hold on to, and he had died many years ago. Bosman's talent was a humbling one. He writes about simple or r.e.t.a.r.ded country people, near the end of the nineteenth century, and the stories build up, add to one another. They create a community, and the simple manner of the writer can take him far, to many moods. He can do comedy; the same simple voice can create great beauty. There is a story about a leopard who appears to the narrator, sniffs menacingly almost up to his face, but then behaves almost like a dog. The narrator begins to boast about his leopard. His neighbours don't believe him. One day the narrator sees the leopard sleeping like a dog on the road, with crossed paws. A closer look reveals the gash caused by a Mauser rifle on the animal's chest. The Mauser is the weapon of choice in the village. The narrator's boasting, and the cruelty of his oafish neighbours, have brought about the death of the magical creature.

The biggest story in the collection is about a mimic trek. The great trek from the Cape is part of the folk wisdom of these simple people; in their imagination it is something that's open to them all to attempt. It takes very little now, at the end of the Boer War, which has been lost, to persuade them that they are about to be oppressed by the British where they are and they should trek to freedom, to Namibia, German South-west Africa, where they will find Germanic people more like themselves. But this trek will be across the terrible Namib desert. Not many of them know about the desert and how to find water in the desert. But their folly makes light of the trouble to come.

They load up the ox-wagons, like the earlier trekkers, and start; the calamities follow almost at once. There are no false leads in Bosman's writing. After the first watering of the cattle the water runs out. Later a muddy hole is found, but the poor tormented cattle sink to their knees, get no water, and find it hard to rise. In their delirium the trekkers, after only a couple of days, persuade themselves that the crossing of the desert is almost done. One morning they find that their African servants have deserted; this is like a death sentence for the group. Detail adds to detail: Bosman's understated style rises wonderfully to the pain and majesty of its terrible subject. Some of the would-be trekkers decide to go back, but in a strange twist (though it is now clear to everyone that the trek across the desert is a horrible mistake) the people who seek to go back lose their moral authority; they have let the side down. One man, the first promoter of the trek, goes mad. He presses on and is later-when the survivors go back and can count the missing-found dead by Bechuana African trackers.

I have bracketed Bosman's stories and the Vootrekker Monument because they share an ambiguity. The ambiguity lies in the subject. The Voortrekker Monument is not only about the Great Trek. It is also about African defeat and African pain. The Monument is a work of art; it aims high. It took eleven years to build and in the early 1940s cost close to 400,000 pounds. Everything about it is thoroughly considered; yet it is brought low by its subject.

Something like this can be said about Bosman's stories. They are beautifully done, but their underlying subject is unstated. These people are not only simple country people, but out of their simpleness, their lack of imagination, they will bring untold pain to the Africans among them. It might be said that Bosman plays fair, that in his quiet way he leaves nothing out, and the reader is free to interpret everything. It may be that Bosman is too quiet, in his way. Rian Malan thought he could be compared to Mark Twain. And there is something there. The comparison has to be with Huck Finn's frightening, absurd father, a wonderful comic creation. But there is nothing as full-blooded as that in Bosman; that full-bloodedness is outside his range, which is more delicate.

5.

A TRULY TRULY great man travelled in the 1890s from Durban to Johannesburg to Pretoria. His journey, in part a modern version (by rail and stage coach) of the Great Trek, was a kind of Calvary; it altered his life and set him on the path of his life's work; but that work was in India rather than South Africa, and there is no monument to him in Johannesburg or Pretoria. The traveller was Mohandas Gandhi, and the story of his Calvary is like this. He came to South Africa in 1893. He was only twenty-four, and though, because of family connections, he had come out as a lawyer for a wealthy Indian Muslim businessman, he had hardly any experience. great man travelled in the 1890s from Durban to Johannesburg to Pretoria. His journey, in part a modern version (by rail and stage coach) of the Great Trek, was a kind of Calvary; it altered his life and set him on the path of his life's work; but that work was in India rather than South Africa, and there is no monument to him in Johannesburg or Pretoria. The traveller was Mohandas Gandhi, and the story of his Calvary is like this. He came to South Africa in 1893. He was only twenty-four, and though, because of family connections, he had come out as a lawyer for a wealthy Indian Muslim businessman, he had hardly any experience.

He had appeared in court only once, in Bombay, in an absurd thirty-rupee (two pounds) affair in the Small Causes Court. Nothing could have been pettier, but for Gandhi it was a fiasco. When the case was called Gandhi got up. He should have questioned the people on the other side. But he became very shy and he could think of nothing to say. All he could do was to sit down again and ask for the case to be transferred (for fifty-one rupees) to Mr. Patel, one of the lawyers at the lawyers' table. Mr. Patel dealt briskly with the matter, and no doubt got his fee; but Gandhi was too mortified to find out whether his former client (a woman) had won or lost. It seemed after this that all he could do as a lawyer was to avoid the court and draft memorials.

It was a livelihood of a sort, but then there came the South African offer from a Gandhi family friend. A year in South Africa, first-cla.s.s return fare, a wage of 105, everything found. Gandhi had the wit to see that with these terms he was going out more as a servant than a lawyer. He also would have seen that the business folk were getting a lawyer cheap. But he didn't mind; he liked the idea of the adventure, and he didn't haggle.

In the beginning it was like adventure: a slow sea journey: Lamu, Mombasa, Mozambique, and then Durban. There he met his employer, and the employer told him he was going to be a white elephant for the firm, since there wasn't much for him to do. Gandhi discovered that the legal case hinged on accounts. He bought a book and began to study it, and he soon knew as much as he needed.

After eight days a first-cla.s.s ticket to Pretoria (in the north) was bought for him. His employer thought that Gandhi should have a five-s.h.i.+lling ticket for bedding. Gandhi preferred to save the money, and thought that this obstinacy and meanness brought on everything-though it is hard to see why he should have thought so. And so began the Calvary. Every stop on the way-Maritzburg, Charlestown, Standerton: every name remembered thirty years later when Gandhi was writing his autobiography (though not all of them survive in the modern atlas)-was full of shame and fear and insult, such bad treatment, such violence, that he wondered whether he would arrive in one piece.

At Maritzburg the railway attendant asked if Gandhi required bedding. He said, "I have one with me." And though he doesn't say, he believes this started the trouble. Two officials came, and then a third, and it was this third who told him he should move to the van compartment. When Gandhi refused, and said they would have to remove him, the official called a police constable; the constable pushed him and his luggage away. Gandhi settled down to waiting through the night. It was very cold. He had an overcoat in his luggage, but thought that if he asked for it he would be insulted. He did a lot of heart-searching that night. Should he go back to India? Should he stay and fight? Should he go on to Pretoria and not mind? He thought he should stay and fight the disease of prejudice, suffering in the process if he had to. At the end of this heart-searching he decided to take the next available train to Pretoria.

If that was all about him in a crisis he would not be Gandhi. But he was already Gandhi-in addition to everything else, a man of forms, a man of the law, with faith in the law (not yet faith in the faith), and the next morning he sent a long telegram to the general manager of the railway. The train he boarded (with the bedding ticket he had refused at Maritzburg) took him to Charlestown. The Calvary continued there. There was no railway between Charlestown and Johannesburg in those days; there was only a stage coach, and the man in charge of it was an absolute thug. He tormented Gandhi, not allowing him to sit inside, and then requiring him to sit not on the box beside the driver but on the footboard. He knocked Gandhi about so badly that the other pa.s.sengers objected.

The coach stopped for the night in the small village of Standerton (not on any biggish map now). There were Indians there, sent by Gandhi's employer to receive Gandhi. So there was protection, and Gandhi used the lull to write a full letter to the agent of the coach company. He got an encouraging reply: the coach from Standerton would be bigger, and the thuggish leader would not be on it. The Indians who were looking after him took him to the coach in the evening, found him a good seat, and so, at last, he reached Johannesburg safely. To do the final leg of the journey, to Pretoria, in the style he insisted on as a lawyer-first cla.s.s-he took the precaution of writing a note to the station master telling him who and what he was, going in person to buy the ticket (one sovereign) and wearing a frock-coat and necktie (there is a photograph of Gandhi in South Africa in this garb, and if we a.s.sume that his wardrobe was limited, it is possible that this photograph shows Gandhi as he went to the Johannesburg ticket office). And then, as so often happens when we prepare too much for trouble, there was none. The man in the ticket office was not South African. He was from Holland, and he was all courtesy and friends.h.i.+p.

Gandhi at this stage believed in the British Empire. He believed that Indians in South Africa were discriminated against because they were politically indifferent, made no representations and were not organised. When the legal work that had brought him to South Africa was done (he persuaded the parties in dispute to accept arbitration), he prepared to go back to India. He went to Durban to wait for a s.h.i.+p. While he was there he saw an item in the local newspaper about the Indian Franchise: there was before the Natal legislature a bill that sought to disenfranchise the Indians of the province. Gandhi was shocked, but the rich Indian businessmen he spoke to knew nothing about it, and were not too concerned. That was even more shocking; and what they decided to do after a little discussion was to s.h.i.+ft the burden of protest to Gandhi.

So Gandhi postponed his return to India. It happened like that again and again; his vision of Indian disabilities widened; Gandhi's one year in South Africa stretched in the end to twenty years. He had been very young and untrained, absurdly shy, only a lawyer who could draft memorials, when he came to South Africa; he was in middle life when he left, the lawyer subsumed in the mahatma, his political tools perfected: civil disobedience, the fast, his own spirituality.

It had all begun to happen on that terrible journey from Durban to Maritzburg to Charlestown to Standerton to Johannesburg to Pretoria. In forty-eight hours his shyness fell away like a garment; young as he was, he became a leader of men. Many Europeans, German Jews especially, helped him in Johannesburg. This would have been a revelation to him. His cause was Indian and local; this outside encouragement would have made him less parochial, and opened him up to the world, politically and in religious matters. When he wrote later of Johannesburg it was with love. Though it has to be said that Gandhi had trouble with Africans; he found it hard to see them, to fit them into his world picture.

Even at that moment of crisis on the Charlestown coach he can find a cruel word, Hottentot Hottentot, for the coach-leader's African servant sitting beside the coach-driver. It is a strange word to come out of Gandhi's mouth, when he is complaining of race prejudice. But there may be an explanation. Gandhi was dictating his autobiography in Gujarati to his Gujarati secretary, Mahadev Desai. Desai did the translation into English, and it is possible that Hottentot Hottentot is the dictionary English word, a kind of synonym, that Desai alighted on. is the dictionary English word, a kind of synonym, that Desai alighted on.

6.

YOU CAN be some time in Johannesburg-the great avenues, the motor-car showrooms, the parks-without seeing the towns.h.i.+ps. You know they are in the background, of course-so much has been written about them-but still the first towns.h.i.+p you see can be quite startling: the little houses of brick or concrete, one like the other, the straight rows, the small yards, the treelessness. When you are far enough away in bad areas the houses or huts become the merest shacks of old corrugated iron sheets, roughly daubed with a number, for the purposes of identification alone. It is amazing that people can live and thrive in such dwellings, but they do, and they make one think of Oscar Wilde: "One can survive anything except death." be some time in Johannesburg-the great avenues, the motor-car showrooms, the parks-without seeing the towns.h.i.+ps. You know they are in the background, of course-so much has been written about them-but still the first towns.h.i.+p you see can be quite startling: the little houses of brick or concrete, one like the other, the straight rows, the small yards, the treelessness. When you are far enough away in bad areas the houses or huts become the merest shacks of old corrugated iron sheets, roughly daubed with a number, for the purposes of identification alone. It is amazing that people can live and thrive in such dwellings, but they do, and they make one think of Oscar Wilde: "One can survive anything except death."

When life was done there was the road to the cemetery at Avalon, named as if in jest after the cemetery of King Arthur's knights: acre upon acre of low tombstones that appeared to repeat the pattern of the petty houses, completing in this way the cycle of life and death. Sat.u.r.day was the great day for funerals here. The motorcars going there flashed their hazard lights, to tell people that they were on solemn business and required priority. It required only a flick of a switch to put on hazard lights, but the effect of the rich-looking cars, the merging traffic lanes and the dancing lights was so jolly that one had the idea that the drivers, out of their Sat.u.r.day joy, were playing with the switches as they drove.

Walls on the way to the cemetery were painted with the names of undertakers. Death was big business here; it never failed; every Sat.u.r.day brought fresh customers. In the openness of Avalon, below the high bright sky you could see the dark-suited groups of men and the women in red and white whose presence marked the spots of fresh graves and funerals. The soil was red and stony. Sometimes-I suppose it depended on the stylishness and the charges of the undertakers-a little tent (flat-roofed, without walls) had been put up not far from the grave, and below this tent (and not really in shade) were women connected with the dead person. These women sat on chairs and some of them wore blankets. The blanket here, Fatima said, was a ceremonial garb, a development from the flayed skin of the sacrificed cow, which was sometimes used to wrap around the corpse to keep it warm.

The new graves were close together, the earth mounds almost touching, and each grave was marked with a provisional identifying slab, to be replaced in time, I supposed, with a proper tombstone. Many of the slabs were for young people, perhaps carried away by the HIV pandemic, a further twist in the chronicle of pain of these people.