Tefuga Read online

  Ted always talks slowly. He doesn’t like saying anything he hasn’t thought about, but you know he has thought. I’m just the opposite, quick and silly! During that last bit he’d been talking extra slow ’cos he was trying to get his pipe going. The shadows sort of came and went as he sucked at the flame. It was almost like looking at two people, dear old Ted and then, suddenly, sharp black shadows like a painted mask, a devil-mask. Then Ted again. I could see he was a bit excited by the story—excited about telling it to me.

  “Well, I think it’s perfectly disgusting,” I said. “And if I had my way I’d stop it, whatever you say about power and things. I think people should only give orders when they know what’s best, and other people should only take orders when they can see it’s a good idea. I always thought that was why we’re here, ’cos we’re doing the Africans good.”

  “That may be our justification to ourselves,” said Ted, “but I think you’d find it hard to get more than a handful of natives, rulers or ruled, to accept it. They might tell you they accepted it, but that’s just another aspect of the same thing. Rulers get told what they wish to hear.”

  “That still doesn’t stop it being disgusting.”

  “Shall we change the subject? What about a dancing lesson?”

  “All right. You needn’t put your pipe out.”

  It’s really extraordinary, this business of s**. I don’t understand myself at all. I didn’t really feel like dancing but I felt guilty about arguing with the poor man and sounding snappy and cross when I’m supposed to be jolly, especially with his poor arm hurting, so I felt I had to. I don’t like myself when I’m snappy, either. Ted’s a rotten dancer but I’m doing my best with him. I tell him I’m going to make him a real lady-killer by the time we go on leave next spring. (Next spring!) So we turned the lamps down and cleared the chairs aside and wound up the gramophone and fox-trotted round on the smoothest patch of floor with the moon yellow along the river and Ted sucking at his pipe over my shoulder. ’Cos of his sling he had to hold me closer than’s really right—for a lesson, anyway—and then by the time we’d wound the gramophone up once or twice Ted had put his pipe down so that we could have some baccy-ey kisses and I could feel the hardness growing under his trousers which made me remember KB’s horrible plank but it didn’t seem to matter—in fact ’cos of the shadows from the lamps or something I could see how Ted’s dear face and the devil-mask really were the same thing and that was rather exciting—very exciting, so that I stopped dancing while the gramophone still had plenty of wind in it and told Ted to count slowly to fifty (just time to put my thingy in) and scampered off to the bedroom.

  And then you change again. I’m not saying it ’cos of doing it—in fact, that was lovely—we really are getting cleverer, both of us!—but I woke up in the middle of the night and found I was thinking about KB and his plank and his wives, and how Daddy treated Mummy, and Ted—not my dear own Ted but someone else in the same body, breathing thickly beside me—one of them. They’ve made the whole world the shape they want it and we’ve got to fit in the corners they’ve left, and I’m simply not going to stand for it! I’m going to do something about it. I’m going to start by doing something about KB and his wives. I don’t know what, yet, but I really am. And then I went to sleep.

  The funny thing is that usually that kind of night idea turns out complete nonsense in the morning, but this one didn’t. I still feel like that, or at least part of me does. It’s real. You’ve made yourself a promise, Bets, and you’re going to keep it.

  Five

  The road to Kiti was appalling. Though in the fairly recent past it had been surfaced with tarmac, this had apparently been done with no other preparation than a levelling of the old earth surface, and the quality of the tarmac itself may well have been dubious. At one point the truck passed, rusting in a small clearing, one of the machines which had been imported to do the work and then had never been reclaimed, it being in no one’s interest to do so. Indeed it could be said that since this section of road led almost nowhere the real function of the machine had been completed before it had ever crossed the river. K.H.P., the Kiti Highway Project, of which the machine and this road were only a minuscule fragment, had allowed a large number of people in London, Lagos, Birnin Soko and elsewhere to make a great deal of money for themselves. The actual laying of the tarmac on the ground had been little more than a concluding ritual, gone through to propitiate the eventual Commission of Enquiry. A sepulchre for the whitewash to adhere to. Rain, heat, and the upthrust of suckers from the roots of inadequately cleared scrub had broken the road surface up, but not yet down. A pot-hole was usually feet, not inches, deep and surrounded by the boulders churned from it. The best patches were now those where the worst tarmac had been used, and had soon crumbled into soft dark gravel. Elsewhere it was seldom safe to exceed a walking pace.

  Jackland was steering his way up out of a road-wide crater when the roar of the Landrover’s engine was drowned for the moment by a clatter from the rear seat as the soldier lounging there loosed off a burst of automatic fire at a heron passing overhead. Jackland finished the climb and stopped with the engine idling.

  “Please tell him not to do that,” he said. “I’m only used to London traffic.”

  Major Kadu had apparently been going to ignore the incident—had not in fact blinked or moved a muscle, as though actually deaf to the racket—but now turned and spoke briskly to the man in Hausa. Two minutes later the same thing happened, again at a point where driving demanded extra care, though this time there seemed to be not even the excuse of a target. Jackland braked, switched the engine off and twisted round. The soldier—one of the pair to whom Pittapoulos was said to have supplied the vodka—laughed in his face.

  “Get out,” said Jackland.

  “You scared from just bit noise?” said the soldier.

  “Get out,” said Jackland.

  There was not exactly a clash of wills, though Jackland gazed at the soldier with firm and focused authority. The soldier gazed back but somehow seemed not to meet the stare. He did not accept Jackland’s command, but nor did he challenge it directly. He appeared to be in that stage of post-inebriation where sporadic efforts are made to return to the high spirits of drunkenness, followed by relapses into the sullenness of the coming hangover. The confrontation was like a charge of crack cavalry into a bog. At last Major Kadu, who would clearly have preferred to ignore the whole episode, turned stiff-faced and gave orders. For a moment it looked as though they might not be obeyed, but then the man scrambled out, scowling. Jackland drove on, leaving him standing in the middle of the road and making tentative motions with his gun, like a beaten batsman rehearsing the stroke he might have played.

  “Thank you, Major,” said Jackland. “The walk ought to sweat it out of him, with luck. As it happens we may be better off without him.”

  Major Kadu did not answer but sat erect in his seat, staring forward. He may simply have been trying to dissociate himself from the display of indiscipline, but he gave the impression of being engaged in some spiritual exercise, contemplation perhaps of the pure Military Idea, purged of all material content. His behaviour from the first had been enigmatic. Having arrived on the scene apparently by accident, on his way to Kiti, he had immediately begun to behave, though with absolute correctness, as though his whole purpose in being there was to obstruct shooting. As soon as the Sarkin had driven off he had asserted himself, refusing to let Burn organize the assembled extras and spectators to shift the launch on the grounds that they were likely to damage military property. He had then put guards on it, and himself bivouacked alongside their camp-site, a couple of hundred yards down stream. This morning he had used Pittapoulos’s attempt to shift the launch by stealth as an excuse to seal the whole landing-stage area off.

  The film-team’s natural assumption had been that they were dealing with a bureaucratic technique they were now well used to, the erectio
n of an obstructive maze which the official in question could then demand payment for guiding them through. Burn’s attempt to act on this after the incident with the vodka had met with a reaction which seemed to make it clear that the problem was not that the bribe had been inadequate. This raised the more alarming possibility that the Major, discovering the film-team on his patch, was preventing their doing anything until he received orders from his superiors. Even after sixty years the Tefuga Incident might be thought a sensitive one. It had required careful manipulation of political factions as well as a number of cash gifts to get permission to shoot any of the film in Nigeria; in fact but for the intervention of Sarkin Elongo this might never have been given. If the Army chose to reopen the question at this point it would mean at the very least a costly delay. It was in the hope of exploring this possibility that Jackland had been so amenable to Major Kadu’s demand to be driven to Kiti, and had chosen to do the job himself. So far, despite several efforts, he had elicited only a few monosyllables. Now, though, the Major suddenly spoke.

  “And how better off, Mr Jackland?”

  “We’ve been having a minor problem. You’ll see when we get there. But I don’t think it’s the sort of thing you want a gun for. Hold on a mo.”

  Conversation became impossible again as Jackland changed down for a detour round a burnt-out truck that entirely blocked the road. To judge by the subsidiary track which had been beaten round it the obstacle had been there for some months. Beyond it the surface suddenly improved. The road they had been using was in fact no more than an improvised spur from the official road to the K.H.P. fish-factory, whose mammoth but never-used sheds lay invisible behind the tree-line to their right. Ahead now, as the truck buzzed along through the scrub, rose the dusky red line of the wall of Old Kiti.

  Once again, surprisingly, it was the Major who picked up the thread of conversation.

  “In the end, Mr Jackland, is nothing else.”

  “Than what, old man?”

  “Than the gun. Even when the British were here this was so. They gave us new laws, which we obeyed. Why? Not out of admiration for these laws. Everybody could see that the British appointed rulers who were stupid or corrupt and who ignored the laws while the British looked the other way. So why? Because behind these their laws was the gun. First the Native Police and the Native Courts. Then the British police and the British courts. Then the soldiers with their guns. In the end, the gun.”

  “The trouble with that, Major, is that the gun has limited usefulness. You can point it at a chap and say ‘Do this’ and he probably will, but it’s different when you try saying ‘Be this’. In particular things like ‘Be public-spirited’ or ‘Be efficient’. Bumming around the globe in the course of earning my pittance I’ve seen a whole range of political systems, and I promise you that for all the inefficiencies of democracy, which I admit can be ghastly enough, the inefficiencies of force outweigh them every time.”

  The brief flow of conversation had been accompanied by easier driving. The road curved in towards the tree belt and joined, immediately below the cliff and wall of Old Kiti, a splendid six-lane highway. To the left it ran in a straight line through the scrub belt as far as the eye could see. To the right, just before it reached the river, it turned up a cutting hacked from the cliff. Though presumably the same age as the spur road it seemed to have been built to first-class standards. Not a pot-hole marred its surface. There was no traffic on it at all. At the northern end of the town wall a rubbish-tip had begun to encroach on the southbound lane. This was the spine of the K.H.P. network, and represented a major outpouring of funds from the Federal Government in the effort to open up this remote province. Jackland swung the truck onto the highway.

  “I do not argue to this point,” said the Major. “Agreed, in only the sports field the gun can say ‘Go!’ All other places it must say ‘Stop!’ Soon I show you one instance.”

  Talk again became impossible as Jackland changed down to take the abrupt curve and drive up the steep slope between the booming rock walls of the cutting. They emerged on the upper level with the highway ahead of them, running between the Old Town wall and the river. The moat had been filled in to take the inner lane, but this had been narrowed again by an erratic line of shanty-houses built along it, using the wall for stability.

  “Stop here, please,” said the Major. “Now, consider this.”

  He nodded towards the river, churning in yellow hummocks and cream foam over the upper boulders of the rapids and then roaring down the slope. Spray floated in the breezeless air, dank but welcome. The huge weight of water produced the usual if inexplicable effect of deep, almost tragic satisfaction in the spectator, but it did not wholly dominate the scene. It was partnered in the unintentional aesthetic effort by something man-made. From the further bank projected in the clean curves of modern engineering the first five arches of a bridge, its huge piers based on the bedrock of the rapids. The final span was missing, but though this gave the bridge the attractive melancholy of a great ruin, the West African equivalent of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, it was not literally one. The bridge had never been completed. A swaying rope footbridge was all that spanned the final gap.

  This morning the already visually thrilling effect was enhanced by the presence of three human beings, as minute in the large-scaled scene as figures in a Poussin landscape. In the channel of the second arch a fisherman had constructed a spillikin-like network of timber to which to attach his fish-traps. He was attending to them at this moment, a grizzled old figure, his naked body shining with spray as he hoisted himself through his web. A ten-year-old child followed him, copying every move. On the stub of roadway above them a cherry-red Datsun had been parked. A young woman wearing jeans and a violet blouse was in the process of locking its doors. These two pricks of unnatural colour, the paint of the car and the silk of the blouse, focused the whole scene. Jackland evidently felt so, for he held his hands up with index-fingers and thumbs squared against each other, making a screen-shaped frame for him to look through.

  “Do you know why the bridge is never finished?” said the Major.

  “Money ran out, I gather. Some kind of jiggery pokery.”

  “The Sarkin diverted major part of the funds to build himself one new palace.”

  “Not our friend Sarkin Elongo, I imagine.”

  “His predecessor. The present Sarkin gave evidence to the Commission. This is not my point. These people only do these things because they are operating in system where is nobody to stop them. No sanction of custom, of tolerable dealing. You destroy all that. You leave us only the sanction of the gun.”

  “You don’t think something of the sort would have happened if we’d never come? No colonial powers, I mean. No slave trade, even. It seems to me that the current mode for blaming everything on us—or rather, if I may say so, our predecessors, for we do enough breast-beating ourselves now, in all conscience—this seems to me a classic example of trying to write history as it might have been. Europe would still have been there, you know. Some kind of infection would have taken place. Whether it would have been better or worse, who’s to tell?”

  Once again as he spoke Jackland raised his hands to frame the bridge and river. The young woman was now walking away from the car towards the footbridge, dissolving with every step the satisfying focus of the original scene. The Major, though no doubt familiar with the commonplaces of the colonial argument, had paused before replying. Jackland took the chance, and the excuse of his own gesture, to move the discussion, not too wrenchingly, nearer the subject of his own real interest.

  “I could have used that if I’d spotted it sooner,” he said. “Oh, I don’t know. There’s so much you can’t fit in without raising extraneous questions. It would have done for a straight documentary, though.”

  “You are making this your film about the Tefuga Incident?” said the Major, so readily that it was apparent that he too had been wai
ting his chance.

  “Not exactly. We’re making a film about my mother’s experiences as the young wife of a colonial official. The deposition of Kama Boi and the Tefuga Incident happened while she was here. We couldn’t have avoided them. The whole thing’s practically finished—we’re just here to do a spot of tidying up. We hadn’t planned to go out to Tefuga at all, but now it looks as though we’re going to have a free afternoon so some of us might make the trip.”

  “The project is almost complete, you say?”

  “Pretty well. We’ve seen the first rushes. The rest of it should be waiting for us in London when we get back.”

  “I see.”

  Having made all the points he wished, with complete truth if some disingenuousness, Jackland reached forward to switch the ignition on. As he did so he took a last glance towards the scene on the bridge. Seeing his head turn the young woman raised an arm in a waving gesture, a quite clear signal that she wished to make contact. Jackland took his hand from the switch and sat back, watching her come.

  “You know this woman?” said the Major.

  “Not yet,” said Jackland.

  Despite her high heels the woman negotiated the swaying planks of the footbridge with complete confidence, and once on dry land came forward with long, elastic steps. The heels and her skin-tight jeans gave her the stilt-legged look of those Nubian dancers shown in Egyptian friezes and still, amazingly, performing (at least for touring TV crews) in their desert settlements. The insect-like effect was enhanced by enormous opaque sunglasses. Her skin was mid-brown, the wiry black hair cropped close on the small round skull. She looked in her early twenties.