The White Father (4 page)

“Where have you been?” said Shrieve, taking the baby on his lap. He knew perfectly well that Amy told them to keep away from the bungalow when the postman came: she felt, no doubt, that their beauty and plumpness would make the Luagabu jealous. He might even try to carry them off. Though the Ngulu had only the barest sense of history, they knew that there were still some secret Ngulu slaves among the Luagabu—children captured in one of the distant raids who had been brought up simply as drudges. It was a fate Shrieve wished to avoid for the rest of the tribe.

“We were playing with the other children,” said Dayu.

“Which other children?”

“The children of the chiefs.”

The six chiefs held rather strictly to their superior status and their children did not officially play with other children. Amy’s children, since their adoption by Shrieve, counted as the children of chiefs. Quite how Tom was going to fit in, when he started getting around and talking more, was unclear. Babies were considered simply babies until they were five: after that the little class-system began. Since, however, the chiefs were chosen every year and not for life, the system continually broke down. Nonetheless it was something the Ngulu regarded as proper, and the children of newly elected chiefs could always be seen strutting about together for a few days after the election. If their practice did not always come up to their theory, the Ngulu continued to take the theory seriously. Many of their customs were based on an almost platonic notion of how things ought to be done which guided, though never rigidly, their behaviour. As long as you knew what was supposed ideally to happen, they seemed to think, you wouldn’t go too far wrong. Principles were only
occasionally
invoked.

Such an occasion was the spring festival. Already, therefore, Dayu had limited her company, and that of her brothers, to their equals. Tom didn’t count as an equal yet, of course, but since Dayu looked after him all the time, he went where she
went and had to make do with the company she chose. Shrieve wondered what on earth his son would make of English class distinctions. It was a question which could not be postponed for more than a few years, for Shrieve wanted Tom to have a good education, and no education at all was possible among the Ngulu. There was, it was true, a building known as the school, and the girls and younger boys went there during the mornings. But there was no teacher, the boys didn’t turn up after they were physically able to join the gangs that swooped about the village and the girls spent the time telling each other stories or playing a primitive but recognisable hopscotch. The Ngulu were classified in the capital as “ineducable”, and though they could read and write such simple signs as they used, these were few in number and they showed no interest in adding to them. The chief function of the school was as a crèche for the babies while their mothers got on with their morning work, for the girls took their siblings with them. At eight the children started to help their parents: at twelve they were considered adult. It was no society in which to prepare a boy for the sort of education Shrieve intended for his son.

“Go and ask your mother for some Free,” he said.

“Free! Free!” cried Kwuri, dancing round the veranda, then nestling under Shrieve’s right arm. He made round eyes at the baby who sat rather stiffly on his father’s lap, looking about with a disdainful air.

“Go along, then,” said Shrieve, kissing the top of Tom’s head and passing him back to Dayu. “It’ll soon be suppertime.”

The children went into the kitchen, Kwuri at speed, Dayu with the stateliness of one who shares the responsibility of motherhood. She wasn’t, in fact, far off it: menstruation usually began at eleven among the Ngulu girls, and they married at thirteen or fourteen.

Shrieve stood up and stretched. Tomorrow there would be a noisy parade as the hunters set off, the children laughing and shouting beside them for several miles. Tonight there would be solemnly excited meetings to discuss the prospects of the expedition. And now it was evening, the sun casting long
shadows across the village street and the women calling in their children from play. Now was the time the cattle would be being watered at the river, half a mile away. The men would be standing up to their knees in the current, washing themselves. The simplicities of life afforded Shrieve a great contentment.

The distant mountains were fading but still just visible as a deep blue shadow against the still deeper blue of the sky. It was his village, they were his people, he loved them. He helped them, he advised them, he protected them: but what mattered was his love.

E
VERYONE
in the capital was working against time.
Independence
was expected to begin early the next year, and there was an enormous amount still to be done. The administration was trying to train Africans for the take-over and to cope with double the usual amount of work as well. When men returned home late from their offices they were met by worried wives: with the rapid withering of empire ex-colonial officials were now two a penny in England, and unemployment harassed their dreams. Shrieve was shocked by the desperation in the air.

Although he approved of the visit to England, Robbins said that it couldn’t have come at a worse moment—he needed every available man to help with what was being bitterly described in the clubs as the winding-up of the estate. No one could be spared to replace Shrieve, but an arrangement was worked out whereby Mackenzie, the officer in charge of the neighbouring Luagabu territory, would visit the Ngulu twice a week.

“It’ll be like being one of those United Nations observers,” said Mackenzie. “I’ll be fired at by both sides.”

He was a tall, dark-haired man, with a slight tic in his left cheek. His hand wandered up there when he was conscious of it, massaging his jaw. Where Shrieve loved and cherished, Mackenzie had to tolerate and rule. The Luagabu were often troublesome, and there had been recent outbreaks of violence against white shopkeepers. A Greek general store had been burned, and there had been attempts to blow up all the petrol dumps in the district. For a time martial law had been imposed.

“It didn’t help at all,” Mackenzie told Shrieve afterwards. “They all go to bed pretty early, so the curfew didn’t bother them, and when it came to the system of passes, we just didn’t
have enough men to make it work effectively in the bush. As for catching the criminal oafs who started the fires …”

“No problems like that with my people,” said Shrieve.

“I dare say not,” said Mackenzie, stroking his jaw. “Your people’s problems start with independence, don’t they? There won’t be any problems for my lot then, because they’ll be running the show. And a pretty fine mess they’ll make of it, too.”

“One mustn’t be cynical.”

“It’s hard not to be. It’s all come too soon, Hugh. If we’d only had another ten years we might have brought on enough people to make a success of it. But there just aren’t the capable men yet.”

It was a common enough complaint, indeed a standard one in all colonies about to become independent. Frequently
half-true
, it perhaps applied less in Shrieve’s colony than in others. The main tribes had reasonably efficient systems of
organisation
, and their leaders seemed ready to make the necessary compromises with each other to stop the country splitting apart. The British dictatorship would give way to the
dictatorship
of the various chiefs and princes in the provinces, while a coalition in the capital tried to maintain some form of loose national unity. Whether the result would be very much worse than what had gone on for eighty years, no one liked to guess. The capital was full of rumours.

Mackenzie came over several times before Shrieve left, and the Ngulu chiefs seemed reluctantly to accept him, though they were acutely suspicious at first because his jeep was driven by a Luagabu. The notion of independence had reached the Ngulu in a very garbled form, and they believed it would be something like one of their festivals, with banquets and many bottles of Free. It proved impossible to get them to understand more than a glimmering of the true situation. When Shrieve tried patiently to explain that he was going away because their affairs required his presence in the white man’s big city many miles away, they looked cheerfully blank. Their concept of space was as limited as their concept of time, and there was no point in going into
detail about aircraft and ships. Though they had seen pictures of the sea, some of them, they didn’t connect it in any way with their river. Shrieve hoped that they wouldn’t forget him in the two or three months he would be away.

Mackenzie regarded them with the puzzled air of a bachelor uncle thrust suddenly into a children’s game.

“Odd lot, your blokes,” he said to Shrieve as they went to the bungalow for some tea.

“They’re all right,” said Shrieve.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. They’re charming, charming. But what the hell are they doing in the middle of the twentieth century? They ought to have died out long ago, surely. They’re too damned good to be true. Too good to survive.”

“All the more reason that their survival should be insisted upon,” said Shrieve, squinting at the porch on which Amy was sitting and fanning herself. She was wearing, he was glad to see, a cotton blouse.

“Oh, of course.” Mackenzie accepted it as automatically as Shrieve. He didn’t love his tribe, but his sense of duty was quite as strong as the next man’s. “Give me a rundown of all the things I mustn’t do, will you? I don’t want to blunder up against any of their superstitions.”

“Well, to start with, do you have to bring a Luagabu driver with you? They don’t like the Luagabu.”

“Not half as much as the Luagabu don’t like them,” said Mackenzie. “But I can’t drive about alone, Hugh, you know that. It’s not safe.”

It was true. Although no Ngulu could be trusted at the wheel of a jeep, Shrieve always took one with him when he drove to the town. It was so easy to break an axle or get bogged down in a dry river bed. It wasn’t sensible to drive alone.

“No,” he said, sighing, “I suppose you can’t. But I honestly think that’s going to be your biggest difficulty with them. What else? They don’t eat any kind of mushroom, God knows why. I once asked Amy to cook me a handful of what the guide says is a perfectly safe and particularly delicious species, and she threw that apron thing over her head—or she would have done
if it had been big enough—and wouldn’t speak to me for two days. Oh, and don’t waste your time asking them why they do or don’t do a certain thing, because they’ll give you a different answer every time. I’ve been here over a dozen years and I still don’t understand half of what they’re up to. But then neither do they.”

Amy rose graciously as they arrived and poured out tea. Watching her trying to behave like a white woman, Shrieve wished he had never taught her such garden party tricks. To have done so, he considered, reflected badly on his moral courage. Damn it, he liked her as she was, not giving a gauche imitation of a stage duchess. White visitors could think what they liked. But now it was too late. He had corrupted her.

Mackenzie was as awkward as she, though, which was some consolation, and he blushed when she called him “My dear” as he left.

“What’s going to happen to her while you’re away?” he said, the tic jerking away in his cheek.

“She’s staying, of course, with the children.”

“You’ve got yourself a real problem there, Hugh, haven’t you?”

“I dare say I have,” said Shrieve vaguely.

Mackenzie shrugged and got into his jeep. He liked Hugh Shrieve, but he felt rather sorry for him.

*

The spring festival went off with an abundance of good omens, as it always did. So many things could be interpreted as good omens that it was inevitable that there should be plenty. This year, too, the hunting party had returned with three
antelopes
, an excellent bag, especially as one of the beasts was almost young. The Ngulu used bows and finely sharpened arrows, and most of the art of their hunting lay in the stalking. But this magnificent animal, exclaimed the huntsmen, had been shot at a distance of fifty yards. The hunter responsible would certainly be made a chief at the next election, and many songs were sung about his exceptional feat. He was given the honour of cutting the throat of the sacrificial bull while the six chiefs
held it down, and when he raised his bloody hands he was loudly applauded. (To have tied the bull, Shrieve guessed, would have been to remove an important ritual element of struggle.)

The Ngulu believed that one of the most powerful gods was a huge bull who wandered about somewhere to the north, in the direction of the game reserve. It was because they held this god in such awe that they never drank cows’ milk or ate beef or veal. After the sacrifice, the bull’s carcase was sung around, decorated with reeds, and then taken on a solemn march round the village on the shoulders of the chiefs. Afterwards it was dragged into the long grass and left for hyenas and vultures. The skin was worn for a month by each chief in turn.

The feast itself always tested Shrieve to the utmost. He didn’t like eating big meals, but he was expected to delight in all the tenderest pieces of antelope, more raw than cooked, and to take large helpings of the many side dishes of vegetables and fruit. There was a particularly nasty Nguluan couscous which he tried unsuccessfully to avoid, and there was a great deal of rough flour over everything which stuck in his teeth. But if the food appalled him, Shrieve enjoyed the stories that were told during the two or three hours of the feast. Anyone could get up and tell any story he liked about gods or men. These tales, like the songs, had their origin in an ancient though frail oral tradition, and because the Ngulu were never very clear about anything the basic themes appeared with many different
variations
. There was a story of a man and a lion, a story of a woman and a snake, a story of a man and a woman by a river. In all of them the actors were undetermined. You could sing the tale about your neighbour or about the god in whose honour you were feasting. The man with the lion turned up as the
huntsman
and the antelope: the story of the woman and the snake was told about Khamva’s sister and the bull-god in one of his transformations: the man and the woman by a river became a young couple by the place where the cattle were watered. It was this free association which made the Ngulu so popular with anthropologists and reduced to despair anyone who tried
to record their religious beliefs according to any preconceived formula.

After the feast there was dancing, which Shrieve watched happily for a while, hoping his digestion wasn’t going to let him down. Later, he would join them for his imitation of a giraffe, always received with acclamation. For the moment he felt definitely queasy. Amy was dancing gleefully in a line of women, with Dayu holding to the tails of her skirt and leaping out of the way when one of her mother’s feet came too close. There were two kinds of dance, the shuffling and the leaping. Shrieve never risked the leaping one, but the shuffle was quite easy. You swayed your hips rhythmically and pushed your feet backwards and forwards or sideways, keeping more or less on the same spot. Then you stopped swaying and did your animal imitation, before returning to the original shuffle. The music came from drums and shrill whistles. The Ngulu hadn’t discovered the art of making stops on their whistles, so the evening was filled with a monotonous piercing noise. Lacking tune and key, the noise was simply noise to European ears, including Shrieve’s, but the rhythms were compulsive and the noise had a literally stunning effect so that the eyes of the dancers became glazed and their movements automatic. Shrieve found the experience unpleasant after an hour, but for that hour he found it magical. The figures leaping and shuffling round a great fire seemed from a distance to take on the living qualities of the animals being imitated, and the drums and whistles were like the howling of hyenas and jackals, with the solemn tread of elephants beneath.

Shrieve did his imitation of a giraffe, and the children, who stayed up all night during the festivals, laughed uproariously and followed him round the fire in elaborate parody. Exhausted, he flung himself down on the ground, and was immediately hauled to his feet and embraced by one of the chiefs. The Ngulu liked Shrieve, he liked them, everything would be good for the coming six months, omens abounded, and he could now take his formal leave and go to bed. His stomach seemed to have survived the dancing all right. He wouldn’t, he knew,
see Amy for several hours, and when she did return she would demand the most vigorous conjugal affection. He retired to his bungalow to rest in preparation for the marathon loving to come. He was, he knew, as happy as he was ever likely to be.

*

Several weeks later Shrieve drove (for once alone) to the town from which the mail was sent out and left his jeep in the care of the Indian mechanic who ran the local garage. He expected, he said, to be back in three months. It was mid-June and beginning to be unpleasantly hot: it would be no hardship to spend the high summer in Europe.

The Indian drove him and his baggage to the rough landing-strip outside the town where an Australian with a small plane ran an irregular service to and from the capital. The journey took three days by jeep, three and a half hours by air: the plane was old, and one day, no doubt, despite the loving attention it received from Garry Varner, it would either refuse to go up or else refuse to stay up. Meanwhile it gave good service.

Varner was tinkering with it in his makeshift hangar, and he stretched out a large oily hand to welcome Shrieve.

“Where have you been these last few weeks?” he said, wiping, too late, his hands on a rag.

“Out in the bush where I belong,” said Shrieve.

“No one belongs out there,” said Varner. A native of Sydney, he was continually surprised to find himself in Africa, miles from anything approaching a city, and quite content to run a dilapidated aeroplane over miles of scrub and dirt. Carrying the mail and odd passengers and occasional
emergency
supplies of Free wasn’t what he’d intended to do. He had had dreams of a fortune from modernising the internal
transport
systems of underdeveloped countries. He had had great ambitions, he had had energy. Now he was a lean man of forty with virtually no hair who fiddled about in an old plane all day long.

“Come and have a beer,” he said.

They went to his bungalow and drank several bottles.
Shrieve was anxious to reach the capital, but Varner’s plane took off when Varner was ready, and Varner wasn’t usually ready till he had drunk four or five pints.