A Writer's World (24 page)

But when you walk through the gates of Kano, with its grassy ramparts running away to the horizon like Mississippi levees, all this vanishes in a trice. Outside the walled city there are communities of lbos and Yorubas from the south, pagans and Christians of diverse sects, among whom you
may often see a young man in a cowboy hat, or hear the thump of ragtime, or even be conducted around a piggery: inside all is Muslim, the throaty quarter-tones of an African muezzin echo from a minaret, and there is a sense of style and latent pageantry. The three provinces of Nigeria have been federated in independence, but Kano feels a different country still, its people have ancient and deeply rooted loyalties of their own, and on ceremonial occasions (or travel posters) the Emir’s bodyguard wears ancient chain mail and visors, like the Muslim warriors of antiquity. From the great white mosque near the palace you can catch the pulse of this romantic and remarkable city. A few cheerful convicts, wearing spotless white numbered smocks, lounge in its courtyards vacuously, and on his platform beside the gate the muezzin, black and beturbaned, arranges his robes rather nervously before beginning descent of his ladder. It is not always easy to gain access to the minaret of the mosque, for there has been a small commotion about the numbers of unbelievers who have been climbing its staircase; but after a few moments of breathy negotiation a retainer swathed from head to foot in bright red textiles, like a painted mummy or an indigestible Swiss roll, unlocks the door for you and ushers you upstairs.

The city sprawls below you festooned in heat and dignity. Somewhere across the horizon lies the Sahara, and this is a place like Isfahan or Damascus, subtly impregnated with desert ways, with an echo of caravanserai, slave trade and pilgrimage. An enormous higgledy-piggledy market straddles a rivulet in the middle of the city, a wonderful affair, with all the colour of black Africa but little of that fetid smell, compounded of dried fish and obscure medicinals, that brings a touch of the jungle to the great marts of Ibadan and the coast. Across the dusty plains radiate the trade routes that still link this ancient place with the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and Mecca itself. Below you lie the palaces of the great Fulani notables, still the aristocratic rulers of this city. Kano looks exceedingly old from that high eyrie, exceedingly assured, exceedingly grand.

But calm and silent though it may seem, in fact the winds of progress, like the horns of Elfland, are faintly blowing through these walls. The British, in half a century of suzerainty, broadened the basis of princely rule but by no means abolished it. Nor has the Federal Government of independent Nigeria. The Emir and his fellows maintain many of their privileges, but inevitably the people are beginning to look around them. Many of them know the Sudan; thousands have been to Saudi Arabia on pilgrimage; there are old links with North Africa; and there is, as among all
Muslims and speakers of Arabic, a deep interest in the doings of Egypt, at once the patriarch and the showboy of Islam. In the end, I do not doubt, the emergence of Nigeria as a free nation will whittle away the character and the traditional stability of Kano, for this city is not quite as serene as it looks. The distrust of northerner for the southerner is stubborn in Nigeria, and vice versa. The Ibos and Yorubas outside the walls, with their clerkly attainments and school certificates, are anathema to the aloof Hausas and Fulanis of Kano; and in return the outsiders turn up their educated noses at a people so incorrigibly sunk in medieval heritage. No great depth of security supports the grandeurs of the place. Like all such survivals of more spacious times, it lies at the mercy of common sense.

Still, for the moment there is no lack of confidence to Kano’s muffled dignitaries, with their amber prayer-beads and their pieties, and no waning assurance to the earnest thumbs-up greeting with which Kano citizens often salute a passing foreigner. It is at the international airport of Kano that many travellers board their aircraft to be swept away to Europe. As they fly northwards to the Mediterranean they will be wise to steal a last valedictory glimpse of this antique city, criss-cross between its grassy walls, like Samarkand beside its Tigris or some lofty market town of Persia. What a farewell to Africa! And what a far-flung triumph, against all the odds of the jazz age and the hucksters, for the old philosophies of Arabia!

A young lion vetted me in Addis Ababa one morning. He lay at ease in a compound outside the palace of the Emperor of Ethiopia, his paws neatly crossed, his tail straight behind him, and he looked me long, cold, detached and calculating in the eye. I would like to have known his views on the future of Addis, that ebony legend among capitals, but he did not
encourage advances. Like the city itself, he looked back at me with an expression not exactly forbidding, and certainly not malevolent, but rather secretive or bemused, as though he had recently swallowed a dormouse, and was determined not to belch.

Addis Ababa, too, is in an indigestive condition, and having some trouble with its juices, but it possesses nevertheless a certain leonine dignity. I cannot call it a handsome city. Its pattern is formless and straggly, its architecture ranges from the mud shack to the pseudo-Corbusier by way of a thousand baroque and Bauhaus aberrations. It is a city without much focus, slums and palaces intermingled – pony-tailed misses streaming out of the lycée, palsied beggars crawling on blistered knees through the market. It offers no shock of vicious contrast, for its separate elements are too intimately fused, but physically it is a faceless kind of place, a little blurred perhaps, a little splodgy.

Among African cities today Addis Ababa is one of the cleanest, one of the least squalid, one of the calmest. This is partly politics, for it is the capital of a patriarchal autocracy not at all encouraging to the effervescence and high jinks; but it is mostly geo-history. Addis compensates for what it is by being where it is, and when. Around it the delightful Shoa highlands lie like a Wiltshire evocation, and groves of junipers, larches, figs and eucalyptus trees sidle into the heart of the city, like the magical forests that invest Kyoto. A glorious half-alpine climate gives a sparkle and a sting to this capital, keeps it free from sludge and stinks, fructifies its shanty slums and humours the wild polychromatic abstracts painted on the walls of its newest apartment blocks. The name Addis Ababa means ‘New Flower’, because it was founded in the odour of hope towards the end of the nineteenth century; and to this day the city feels young and unexpectedly charming, graced alike by the superb manners and the green fingers of the Ethiopians.

Never was there a more handsome citizenry, since the days of the Assyrian bas-reliefs. I once paused to watch a merchant weighing millet in the marketplace of this city. His wife sat loyally beside him, dressed in a long white gown and a string cap, and three or four labourers in ragged tunics hastened backwards and forwards with their sacks. The merchant sat on a kitchen chair as lordly as any Prester John, bowed gravely over his scales, and when he looked up at me I saw burning black eyes sunk deep between the cheekbones, a nose chiselled like granite, a mouth at once haughty and infinitely delicate, grey hair curling Homerically around the temples, a thin face cold with authority, a look marvellously salted with dry
and knowing humour. He smiled when he noticed me, the thin quiver of a smile, and as he did so he slammed the lock of his scales with a gesture terribly final, as though he had ordered the instant expulsion of the Jesuits, or had just beheaded his grandfather.

Addis Ababa is full of faces just as memorable: the resigned, distant, biblical faces of the old men who loiter, leaning lightly on their crooked sticks outside the iron-roofed shacks of the district courts; the intelligent, wary faces of the young bloods home from Europe and America; the aloof, incurious faces of the Muslims washing their feet in the fountains of the mosque; the gentle, empty, haunting faces of the young prostitutes, in virginal white and vicarage embroidery, who wait outside their dim-lit boudoirs (sickly pink, blue, or conventionally red) along the pavements of Churchill Street. This is Africa with Semitic injections. These are not the coarse, laughing faces of Accra. Here there is something extra in the blood, something more restrained and lofty, something that suggests to me the black nobles of legend, or the Magus at the stable door.

For Addis Ababa has nobility; the nobility of a proud but gentle Christian faith, and of an immemorial self-respect. This is a city, like Bangkok, that has scarcely known the long humiliations of colonialism, and has not been obliged to wallow through the sad morass of recrimination, frustration and twisted emotion that belabours the emancipation of subject capitals. Amid all the thump and hubbub of the African renaissance, Addis Ababa stands alone as the capital of an ancient and truly African state. It thus retains a trace of feudal hauteur. There is a Minister of the Pen here, and a functionary called the Mouth of the King. Lions of Judah abound in gilded effigy, and from every hotel office, every restaurant wall, every barber’s mantelpiece, there gazes the image of His Imperial Majesty, the Elect of God, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, splendidly ceremonial in court dress, austerely military in khaki. This is a traditionalism rich and lovable, but flecked with pathos. There are not many kings left on the earth, and it is moving still to encounter one who claims direct descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

It cannot last, this lion’s style. It is fretted, frayed and mocked already. Isolation bred the grandeur of the Ethiopians, but this is a capital no longer remote or mysterious. I can think of half a dozen more difficult to reach, and several more backward and obscure. There is a daily air service nowadays to Europe, and the London Sunday papers get here on Monday. Addis has all the appurtenances of a modern city, from cold-jet dentistry to espresso coffee bars. Americans from Berkeley, Germans from
Frankfurt, sometimes think this an insufferably primitive capital, with its beggars and lepers and bumbling bureaucracy, but to us old hands of Empire and the Third World, us habitual waiters in ante-rooms and addicts of Enterovioform – to wanderers like us Addis Ababa is a haven of convenience.

But the sleazier corrosions of progress are also beginning to show, and a little of the pan-African fizz is bubbling around the inherited certainties. The patriarchal order is doomed, and even the Emperor himself, that grand old warrior-sage, is no longer sacrosanct. Addis Ababa seethes with foreigners, Swedes and Germans and Americans and Englishmen, connecting telephones, teaching woodwork, managing hotels, building roads, squabbling and intriguing and exhorting and complaining and making money and always, night and day, year after year, syllable by syllable, assuring this antique comity that its systems are wrong and its values misguided. Addis is not a passionate city, daubed with slogans and loud with demonstrations; but as this flood of alien energies pours in, as ever more young Ethiopians come home from Harvard, Bonn or Oxford, so we may expect the new hybrid culture of Africa to take root here too, swamp the old gardens of Ethiopia with its jazzy proliferation and reduce this still lofty metropolis to the level of our times.

It has not happened yet. The Emperor still rules in Ethiopia, and this remains a capital of high-flown protocol. There were thirty-five lions in the compound that morning, some young and cuddly, some majestically mature, and as I walked away I fancied the ruminative gaze of each one of them fastened steadily upon my person. They were very silent and absolutely still. It was like that moment of polite but faintly embarrassed hush when the ladies are leaving with a swish for the drawing room, and the men are eyeing the port. Those animals did not really want me there at all, but they were cubs of the Conquering Lion, and they would not dream of showing it.

I went on one of the McAllister tugs, sailing from the Battery. The McAllisters are an old New York family of tugboat and harbour men, Irish by origin, ebullient by disposition, and hospitable. Three of their boats sailed that morning in close formation, and they were loaded down with what seemed to me to be several hundred McAllisters – grave elder McAllisters, gay miniskirted McAllisters, gossipy McAllister matrons, virile McAllister bravos. The boats themselves were naturally named for McAllister ladies, and all over their decks, rather loosely kitted out in green kilts and tam-o’-shanters, the pipers of the New York Donegal Pipe Band played in lusty antiphony across the waves. There was a satisfying buffet lunch on board, and plenty to drink, and by the time we had passed beneath the Verrazano Bridge, and saw the elegant and spindly outline of the
QE2
approaching from the open sea, I felt myself an honorary McAllister for the day, and looked out across the water with a Donegal benevolence.

The harbour is the most beautiful of New York’s possessions, and nowadays it is one of the last refuges in an unhappy metropolis of that fizz and crackle, that sense of lovers’ release, which once used to be synonymous with Manhattan. Here some of the American pageantry survives, and when the
QE2
sailed in that day much of the old American generosity showed too, and the sentimental loyalty. The sea was choppy and the wind rough, but the sun came out just as the ship passed through the
Narrows, and so in a bright flurry of flags and foam our procession passed through the Bay. The liner towered above high, bright and very new, almost fragile. The sky was thick with helicopters and seaplanes, idling happily about there like kites, or paper aeroplanes, and all around us scores of little ships noisily and exuberantly escorted the liner towards her berth.

On the forecastle of the
QE2
the ship’s cooks, in their chefs’ hats, gazed impassively towards Manhattan, and in an open door in the flank of the liner a solitary white-clad sailor stood silhouetted nonchalant, even bored, against the black inside, as though such spectacles were observable on every voyage. For the rest, everybody seemed to be waving. We waved, all barriers down, at total strangers. We blew kisses all over the place. A girl in a blue dress jumped up and down with excitement on the boat deck, and through the slightly steamy windows of what I took to be some ferociously air-conditioned or centrally heated lounge, I could see pale elderly faces cautiously peering into the open air outside, looking wistfully nostalgic still, I fancied, for mahogany and Palm Court.

What fun it all was! The sirens constantly blew. The flags fluttered from every mast. The Staten Island ferry chugged by with a huge welcome sign hanging from its superstructure. The aircraft buzzed. The Donegal pipers, temporarily abandoning their reels and coming disarmingly apart at the joints of their accoutrements, were to be encountered in odd corners of the tugboat merrily drinking Scotch and swapping badinage. Now and then waves of water sloshed through the scuppers of our boat, washed the legs of the buffet table, and made us all leap on to deck chairs; but nobody much minded, the best came out in all of us, the world was fine, New York was laughing, and as the noble ship paced up the Hudson River and turned into her berth, news came over the tug’s radio that Mrs Gerard McAllister, my hostess, had just become a grandmother.

I remembered, as we limped damply but contentedly ashore that afternoon, looking all those months before at my photograph of the Bay, and presumptuously claiming it to be mine. Now, I thought, it really was. No Briton alive, I am sure, had seen more of New York harbour, or knew it better, or felt more at home upon its wide, dirty, magical waters.