European Diary, 1977-1981 (55 page)

In the meantime I had an early lunch with Harold Lever at Brooks's and found him buoyant and very sensible on nearly everything. My agreement with him, as with Shirley, is now very close indeed. He is of course much more interested than Shirley in economic and monetary matters and remains a firm partisan of EMS. He is depressed about the Government, but not excessively so, and thinks it might easily win the election. He intends to stand himself again and is obviously quite keen to go on in the Cabinet if he can. But when I suggested to him at the end that if they were still in office after Nicko
²
and wanted to make a political appointment to Paris he and Diane would do it well, he responded rather enthusiastically.

SATURDAY, 6 JANUARY.
Brussels and Paris
.

To Paris by plane in the early evening. To the Embassy and then out to dinner at Lipp with Nicko. I had a long talk with him about the mysteries of the French switch of line, why they had become so adamant about MCAs. I am not sure that he understood things a great deal better than I did, but referred to some important conversation which Barre had had with the German Ambassador in which he had laid down the position, and said that I would no doubt discover more about it in the morning. He was, however, in some ways as exasperated by the French as I was. He also said that he thought François-Poncet had been made Foreign Minister partly because Giscard wanted to get rid of him from the Elysée, but that may be unreliable hearsay.

Then, Nicko having gone off to catch a night sleeper to Grenoble, I called on Ortoli in the rue de Bourgogne and went over the whole business with him. He had been seeing a lot of people and was clearly nervous about forthcoming rows with the French Government. However, we managed to hammer out a common position on which he was perhaps just a little wobbly but to which I think he will hold at any rate for the time being. He said that there was a view in Paris that the Commission was too frightened of a vote of censure in the Parliament. It was not absolutely clear to me why we shouldn't be a bit concerned about that, though no doubt ‘frightened' is not the right impression to give. I stayed the night in a completely empty Embassy surrounded by a frozen Paris, one or two servants, but no Hendersons, no other guests, a rare experience.

SUNDAY, 7 JANUARY.
Paris and Dakar (Senegal)
.

To Matignon to see Barre at 10.30. Barre received me as friendlily as ever and we had quite a useful talk for fifty minutes mainly in French. Crispin and Barre's man, Jean-Claud Paye, were there taking notes. I explained that our interest was overwhelmingly to get the EMS in position as quickly as possible, that we were very disappointed at the delay, which we found extremely surprising, and I feared that whatever had happened the French hold-up had prevented it being born
en beauté
. However, that was so. What I now wished was to see it in place, but my other, and equal, priority
was not to let any agreement undermine the essential need for freezing farm prices otherwise we would be in a hopeless position with surpluses.

Barre attempted to explain why MCAs were of such importance to them, but this was a general statement based upon a long-term objection to the unbalancing of the market between France and Germany and certainly did not amount to any explanation of what had happened between 7 December and 31 December to make them become of such dominating short-term importance. On a price freeze he was reasonably sympathetic, without absolutely committing himself. On the budget, he said that they would be as hard as a rock in principle, particularly in relation to the future, but would seek compromise on the present budget. He was not I think too well-informed about this and didn't contradict any of the arguments which I put forward, including my view that while we wanted to avoid a resort to the Court, because we thought a political solution was much better, if a political solution was not forthcoming I did not see how we could avoid ending up in the Court. On the EMS, in response to a request from me, he specifically denied that the French were using MCAs as an excuse. He denied that there was any French cooling off on the basic desirability of the scheme.

At 1.00 I took an Air France Concorde to Dakar
³
where it was a rather nasty cloudy day with the sort of clouds which would produce rain in Europe, but apparently don't in Dakar at this time of the year. The city, more or less surrounded by sea, looked reasonably agreeable. There was a ceremonial welcome by the Prime Minister at the airport and we then drove to the Residence Medina, a government guest house; not a very attractive building, I fear, and sited, for some mysterious reason, on almost the only spot in Dakar from which you cannot see the sea.

One and a half hours' meeting with the Prime Minister (the second man, the President being the head of the Government) who seemed to me agreeable and sensible.
⁴
He is enormously tall, very black, and known as ‘the Giraffe'. Dinner with the Commission delegate.

MONDAY, 8 JANUARY.
Dakar
.

A call on Senghor, the President, from 11.00 until 12.15. He is a little, bright man, looking much younger than his seventy-two years, completely French having been a Socialist Deputy for fifteen years before independence, having lived in France during the pre-war period, having had, as he is very fond of telling one, a lot of literary
salon
life, and still being a great
littérateur
, composer and translator of poetry. However, on this occasion the conversation was mainly political, and largely carried on by him. He expounded a hard anti-Communist line, complaining that the West did not take the Russian threat nearly seriously enough and didn't do enough in Africa to combat it. He didn't necessarily want European troops, but when he put Senegalese troops into Zaïre it would be a great advantage if we gave them some financial support. He expressed interest in a West African defence community though without the ‘Marxist/Leninist states' in it. He made an attack on Algeria for racist policies, and put forward a whole series of views, some of them sensible, some of them less so, but worth listening to.

Lunch at the rather magnificent residence of the French Ambassador which we were told had been built by Louis de Guiringaud, but was hardly a constructional success as nearly all the pigeons of Dakar congregated under the roof.

In the late afternoon we went by motor launch across a narrow strait to the island of Gorée which has been occupied by almost everybody, Dutch, Turks, Danes, British and French, from about 1500, and which has achieved great recent fame as a result of
Roots
drawing attention to its position as a departure point for slaves. We made a rather gruesome but notable visit to the Maison d'Esclaves, seeing all sorts of horrors. It is now run as a sort of black museum with a lot of American visitors. The whole island, apart from being too windy, had a considerable quality of its own and was well worth visiting.

Dinner with Senghor in his Presidential Palace. A party of about ten, including four of Senghor's ministers. It was quite a remarkable occasion, epitomized by the authoritarian choice of drink: before dinner there was only Jack Daniels Sourmash, and at dinner only an excellent pink champagne. Senghor led the conversation, for two and a quarter hours, before, over, and after dinner, without
raising any political subject. It was entirely cultural, general intellectual conversation, a little pretentious I thought occasionally on his side, as no doubt he did on mine. He claimed not to be able to speak English, but to read it fluently, as he had translated the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot into French, which would by any standards require a very remarkable command of written English.

I asked him who he thought were the two outstanding French poets of this century and he mentioned two people of neither of whom I had ever heard. He then asked me who I thought were the two outstanding French novelists, and I swallowed and said Proust and Simenon (treating ‘French' as embracing Walloon). He said, ‘Proust naturellement, mais pourquoi Simenon?' It would have been more original to have put it the other way round. We had a good deal of Proustian conversation later in the evening linked to his wife's property between Caen and the sea, which, as I pointed out, meant that it was very near Cabourg, and we then both of us tried to remember what Cabourg was called in À
la Recherche
. I had it on the tip of my tongue, but I had the impression that it was a little further back in the recesses of his mind. However, on the way out I suddenly remembered Balbec, and announced it to him, by which he seemed remarkably struck.

It was a somewhat stilted dinner and I went away with some doubt as to whether anyone so self-consciously intellectual and literary has not an element of the bogus in him.

TUESDAY, 9 JANUARY.
Dakar and Bamako
.

Ambassadors of the Nine for a briefing, and then a press conference. The Prime Minister came at 11.30 to take me to the airport, bearing various farewell presents with him, including the Grand Croix of the Légion d'Honneur of Senegal—an enormous green sash with a star and God knows what, and a letter from Senghor conferring this upon me and making it fairly clear that it was done mainly on the basis of my literary knowledge and in particular my ability to produce the name of Balbec!

We then flew to Bamako in Mali in a very luxurious private Senegalese plane. We were greeted by a whole stream of ministers and, so far as one could tell, a large part of the Malian army, with
flashing helmets, some of whom formed various guards of honour for inspection. Also there were all the Western ambassadors, in other words two: the German, who was broadly in charge from the Community point of view, and a little American career lady (a French Ambassador exists, but was away).

To the Hôtel de l'Amitié, an enormous fourteen-storey building set back half a mile from the River Niger, which at that point is nearly a mile wide, thousands of miles from the sea though it is, and were installed on the top floor in a very comfortable suite with a good view. We were informed by the Commission delegate (a fairly elderly Italian with great knowledge of African culture and African art and several books to his credit—but not, I thought, a great grasp of actuality) that a
coup
, a peaceful
coup
he opined, was imminent and might easily affect the head of state. However, we became increasingly sceptical of this because the ministers with whom we had dealings, including President Traoré himself, didn't seem particularly nervous.

First, I had a short meeting alone with the said Youssouf Traoré, then a drive up the hill to a sort of ministerial compound, where we had what seemed a very long meeting, mainly because the Minister of Planning made a complaining speech lasting nearly an hour and going into immense detail, which was obviously thought inappropriate by his colleagues. Then to a large garden party in the dark at the house of the Commission delegate. Afterwards to dinner with the German Ambassador (Schraepler), a nice man of unusual charm with an agreeable French wife.

WEDNESDAY, 10 JANUARY.
Bamako, Timbuctoo and Bamako
.

Took off at 8.20 in a curious twin-engined, high-wing, old Russian plane which I viewed with apprehension and dismay, but which in fact proved to be extremely stable for the three-hour slow journey, diverting in order to see things like the Silingué Dam and to follow the course of the River Niger to Timbuctoo (Tomboctu in French and therefore in Mali).

I was greeted at the airport by the military governor, mayor, etc. and then at the entrance to the main square, five miles away, by two Nubian maidens, one of whom presented me with some dates,
which I ate, and the other with a bowl of camel's milk, which I put to my lips but refrained from drinking as it had the most nauseous smell. Then into the square where the whole population seemed to be lined up. Fortunately the population of Timbuctoo is now only about 8000, as compared with 100,000 in 1500, so it was not quite as formidable a gathering as it might earlier have been. A lot of music and cheering, though quite whom or what they thought they were cheering I am not sure. Then I walked round the square and decided that the only thing to do was a Richard Nixon, plunge in, shake hands and then move on fifty yards and plunge in again.

Then a tour of the town with an excellent guide, seeing the mosque, which was very old, various houses where European explorers of the early nineteenth century had lived (and mostly died), and the starting point of the old caravan routes across the desert. I rode on a camel for a mile to lunch. It was my first camel ride since c. 1928 at the London Zoo, and a distinctly hazardous enterprise.

We had a rather nasty lunch in a rather nasty hotel. After having consumed bits of three or four courses I assumed that the lunch was over, but there was then a sudden stirring at the windows which were thrown open, with the curtains widened, and in came the most enormous roast camel, trussed like a sort of monstrous turkey, though about seventeen times as big, borne in upon a stretcher and laid down with great cheering. Then they performed the old desert trick of taking a whole roast sheep out of the inside of the camel, a whole roast chicken out of the inside of the sheep, a little pigeonneau out of the inside of the chicken, and an egg out of that, and one had to eat a little of everything. The camel seemed to me to have rather a bland taste, not nearly as objectionable as its milk. Then back to Bamako for a Government dinner with speeches and the presentation to me of another Grand Croix du Légion d'Honneur. (Crispin got a Chevalier.)

THURSDAY, 11 JANUARY.
Bamako and Accra
.

A meeting with President Traoré at 8.30. He showed no signs of having been deposed during our absence in Timbuctoo and indeed, though saying nothing memorable, seemed to me a good deal more self-confident and also rather more interesting than when he had come to see me in Brussels.

We took off for Accra at about 12.30 and got there at 2.15, arriving in steaming heat quite different from the relative coolness of Dakar, the moderate heat, 75° perhaps, of Bamako, and the considerable but very dry heat of Timbuctoo, where it may have been 85° in the afternoon. But in Accra (mysteriously January is the warmest month of the year, despite it being 8° north of the equator) it was 93°, sticky and horrible.