V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

It was an old story, one we had hardened ourselves to. Even distress, if sufficiently repeated, becomes vulgar. But this scene was large and moving. The old Negro in his old suit, discoloured at the edges and under the arms, a man I could see cycling back from the humiliations of his office, hat on his head, the badge of respectability, cycling back to his street where he was no doubt respected and where perhaps he had created for himself the character of the wise old Negro who knew the ways of the white world but would speak only when the time came. The time was now!

Browne listened without irritation. When the old man was finished he said, ‘You must leave this firm. It is the only advice I can give you.’ The old man looked stunned. Browne waited, then went on, ‘Look. I could take up this telephone here and get on to the Chairman. Tomorrow morning you would be sitting in the Manager’s chair.’ This directness in Browne’s speech, this folksy creation of pictures, was new; it was as impressive as the confidence he showed in his own power. The old Negro looked abashed, playing with the idea of himself in the Manager’s chair. We were all silent, studying Browne, the magician, the man now apart. ‘But then what?’ he asked abruptly, irritably. The old Negro looked down; he was going to say no more. ‘Then what?’ Browne said. ‘You want me to tell you? Somebody in London would decide that they want to get this contract or that contract. And then what? Who would be the man they would send to ask me? To bribe me. Who?’

And the old Negro, playing the rhetorical game, answered with pride and satisfaction: ‘They would send me.’

The audience was over. Petitioner and court were satisfied. And I thought: goodness, in a few hours consciousness of power has turned a semi-politician, a semi-ideologue, a joker, into a folk-leader.

He recognized our admiration. He said, simulating impatience, ‘If I stay here these damn people will eat me up.’

And now I could no longer read his ambivalence.

Did Browne believe in his power? Was he overwhelmed by the despair that comes at the moment of success and the knowledge that success changes nothing? He had shown me the nature of the violation we had been exploiting. Did he feel, like me, that violation was violation and could not be undone, even from where he stood, the limit of his ambition? I could no longer read his ambivalance. All I knew was that the time came when he longed to step down, to return to the past we had so lightly destroyed. But how could such a man, who had revealed such power, be permitted to do so by those faceless men — M for Minister, M for master — whom we had created? Like me, he became a prisoner of his role.

So the Roman house died a second time. Browne presently moved into his official residence. There he was protected from mendicants, petitioners, lunatics and even his colleagues. He took to writing me letters. I thought at first they were meant to reassure me, like his whispers on the public platform. Then I began to feel that they were exercises. I caught his mood; my letters matched his. It was an undergraduate correspondence, somewhat pretentious, a little like that I was carrying on with Wendy’s brother agonizing now in Quebec over a separate French state as well as Shiva’s dance of life and death. Browne and I wrote as though for publication. We wrote about books we had read, ideas that had struck us; we wrote about everything except the work we had undertaken; and though in our letters we referred to our meetings, we never, when we met, referred to our letters. We continued, though less frequently, to appear together in public, each still being his role. But we were no closer there than we were in cabinet, where each man was alone, secretive, careful. The process of learning had begun, and each man was keeping his knowledge to himself.

We learned about power. We learned about our poverty. The two went together, but it was our poverty which made the understanding of power more urgent. In territories like ours the process of learning about power takes four years. Our constitutions usually prescribe an election in the fifth year; and it is in the fifth year that people begin feverishly to challenge the strength of their rivals or colleagues. Everyone’s bluff is called, and the strong are revealed. There is an upheaval; the result often is that second elections are never held. Crunch-time came in Isabella and I was the one to go. I went like a lamb. I blame no one. It was left to me to act, and I didn’t. I held a good many of the cards. I threw them away. My behaviour seemed logical enough to me at the time. Now it seems irresponsible.

It was part of our innocence that at the beginning we should have considered applause and the smell of sweat as the only source of power. It took us no time to see that we depended on what was no more than a mob, and that our hold on the mob was the insecure one of words. I went a little beyond this. I saw that in our situation the mob, without skills, was unproductive, offered nothing, and was in the end without power. The mob might burn down the city. But the mob is shot down, and the power of money will cause the city to be built again. In the moment of victory we had wondered why no one had called our bluff. Soon we saw that there had been no need, that our power was air. We had no trade unions behind us, no organized capital. We had no force of nationalism even, only the negative frenzy of a deep violation which could lead to further frenzy alone, the vision of the world going up in flames: it was the only expiation.

The situation was squalid. But we were among men to whom, in trips abroad at the invitation of foreign governments, in conferences in London, in the chauffeured Humbers and in the first-class hotels of half a dozen cities, the richness of the world was suddenly revealed. We were among men who felt more cheated, more bitter in their power than they had ever done before, men who feared that the rich world so wonderfully open to them might at any moment be withdrawn. Each man therefore sought to turn that airy power, which his anxiety rightly painted to him as insecure, into a reality. Some sought it in quick money. The emissaries of Swiss banks came to us: this corruption at the edges we were powerless to prevent. Some tried to become labour leaders. Some tried to subvert the police. To all, the proclamation of distress was necessary, with its complement of racial antagonism.

We were trapped in our situation. Each attempt at the establishing of a personal security prepared the way for further disorder. The vision alarmed me, to tell the truth. I prepared a five-thousand-word paper for cabinet on the reorganization of the police force. It was my aim to rehabilitate it socially, to rid it of its association with backyards; I wanted to see it integrated into such responsible elements of society as we possessed. I proposed to keep on British officers while we created our own officer class; there was to be no sudden promotion for the unqualified or the socially unacceptable. The paper made me suspect. It was dismissed as illiberal by the spokesmen for bitterness; nothing was done. I saw that in our situation the police force or the regiment might itself become a state, like its parent, in which power might change at any time, the soldier might refuse to obey, and indeed ten determined men might wipe out the leadership they refuse to obey because they see no reason why it should be obeyed.

I had never thought of obedience as a problem. Now it seemed to me the miracle of society. Given our situation, anarchy was endless, unless we acted right away. But on power and the consolidation of passing power we wasted our energies, until the bigger truth came: that in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the outside. Such was the controlled chaos we had, with such enthusiasm, brought upon ourselves.