A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [95]
The article about the race riot—after that bright opening paragraph which I had read in the shop—turned out to be a compilation of government decrees and quotations from newspapers. There was a lot from the newspapers; Raymond seemed to have taken them very seriously. I couldn’t get over that, because from my experience on the coast I knew that newspapers in small colonial places told a special kind of truth. They didn’t lie, but they were formal. They handled big people—businessmen, high officials, members of our legislative and executive councils—with respect. They left out a lot of important things—often essential things—that local people would know and gossip about.
I didn’t think that the papers here in the 1930s would have been much different from ours on the coast; and I was always hoping that Raymond was going to go behind the newspaper stories and editorials and try to get at the real events. A race riot in the capital in the 1930s—that ought to have been a strong story: gun talk in the European cafés and clubs, hysteria and terror in the African cités. But Raymond wasn’t interested in that side. He didn’t give the impression that he had talked to any of the people involved, though many would have been alive when he wrote. He stuck with the newspapers; he seemed to want to show that he had read them all and had worked out the precise political shade of each. His subject was an event in Africa, but he might have been writing about Europe or a place he had never been.
The article about the missionaries and the ransomed slaves was also full of quotations, not from newspapers, but from the mission’s archives in Europe. The subject wasn’t new to me. At school on the coast we were taught about European expansion in our area as though it had been no more than a defeat of the Arabs and their slave-trading ways. We thought of that as English-school stuff; we didn’t mind. History was something dead and gone, part of the world of our grandfathers, and we didn’t pay too much attention to it; even though, among trading families like ours, there were still vague stories—so vague that they didn’t feel real—of European priests buying slaves cheap from the caravans before they got to the depots on the coast. The Africans (and this was the point of the stories) had been scared out of their skins: they thought the missionaries were buying them in order to eat them.
I had no idea, until I read Raymond’s article, that the venture had been so big and serious. Raymond gave the names of all the liberty villages that had been established. Then, quoting and quoting from letters and reports in the archives, he tried to fix the date of the disappearance of each. He gave no reasons and looked for none; he just quoted from the missionary reports. He didn’t seem to have gone to any of the places he wrote about; he hadn’t tried to talk to anybody. Yet five minutes’ talk with someone like Metty—who, in spite of his coast experience, had travelled in terror across the strangeness of the continent—would have told Raymond that the whole pious scheme was cruel and very ignorant, that to set a few unprotected people down in strange territory was to expose them to attack and kidnap and worse. But Raymond didn’t seem to know.
He knew so much, had researched so much. He must have spent weeks on each article. But he had less true knowledge of Africa, less feel for it, than Indar or Nazruddin or even Mahesh; he had nothing like Father Huismans’s instinct for the strangeness and wonder of the place. Yet he had made Africa his subject. He had devoted years to those boxes of documents in his study that I had heard about from Indar. Perhaps he had made Africa his subject because he had come to Africa and because