V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

From London there presently came more offers of technical aid and experts on short-term contracts. We gratefully accepted; so that in the end there were more expatriates than before. Some of our ministers took pains to be seen in public with their English permanent secretaries, who behaved impeccably. It was what these ministers offered their followers: the spectacle of the black man served by the white: the revolution we claimed to have created.

Satire creeps in. But understand the colonial politician. It might have been personal indignities that drove him on. He can reply in success only with personal dignity, and for some little time it satisfies his followers. He is a symbol; he holds out hope for all. It is part of his function then to turn to the trappings of power: the motorcar marked M, the suits on the hottest days, the attendant white men and women. Understand, too, his jumpiness. He knows his own futility; and every time he returns from the rich world his delighted reaction to his country — ‘At least this portion of the world is mine’ — is quickly lost in the uneasiness he feels at the precariousness of his position. For the future he cannot read he must lay up money; uneasiness turns to panic even on that ceremonial drive from airport to city which also takes him past the compound of the tall ochre-and-red overseers’ houses. Understand the jumpiness, the sensitivity to criticism, the solitude.

Understand Browne’s irrational, panicky behaviour, the disappearance of his frivolity, his angry descents among us and the people, and together with the assertion of his personal dignity his proclamation now not of distress alleviated but of distress just discovered, and greater than before. He had settled in the role of folk-leader. He did not have the courage to go beyond that; he had come to terms with the bitterness and self-disgust his role must have brought him. His speeches altered, though to the public their substance remained the same. Whereas before he had spoken of distress as though speaking only to the distressed, now he seemed to be addressing the guilty as well. He shrieked at them, he lamented, he tried to terrify. His defiance became as shameful as the thing he preached against. He was, I saw, in competition with his inferiors. But it paid off. It made him into a figure of a kind; it won him paragraphs in weeklies of international circulation. The outsiders who would have been chilled by his earlier appeals to dignity and stoicism, because such appeals would have excluded them, were now flattered by the more recognizable anguish he proclaimed and were willing to recognize him as a leader at last. Even if there had been the will to go forward from the emptiness of his position, this recognition would have weakened it.

Our correspondence continued, that oblique irrelevant exchange which yet, as I can now see, revealed so much; and it was from this correspondence that I began to feel that more and more he would have liked to step down from the role that imprisoned him, as once his house next to the Kremlin barber shop had imprisoned him. In his letters he took me back to the past, back to London, back to the writing of his unfinished novel, back to Isabella Imperial and the days of my father’s agitation, back to the child who had been dressed and powdered and, to the delight of his parents and envy of his schoolfellows, had sung that so successful coon song. From these letters I could gather not only his contempt for our colleagues who were no longer made sharp by their personal bitterness; not only his contempt for the endless stream of mendicants who appealed to him in the name of their common race and their common past; I began to feel that I was entering a fantasy which was like my own. Here was more than longing for the past we had destroyed, of erratic magazines with statements of policy, of occasional pamphlets, of quick ideas worked out in bars. Here was a longing for different landscapes, a different world, where a child’s first memory of school was of taking an apple to the teacher and where, in essays at least, days were spent on temperate farms. Here was a longing, like my own, for freedom and what we considered the truth of our personalities. In fantasy, perhaps, this truth was one of the things success ought to have brought; the disappointments of fantasy are not the less real. So we each to the other explained our actions or inaction — what else, I see, was the purpose of my own ponderous essay on Pompey — while we continued to be political colleagues, each supporting the other.

It was in the third year of our government that there occurred the incident which made Isabella notorious; and yet it did not lessen our reputation outside for stability and good sense. It was the tasteless idea of the Cercle Sportif to celebrate Browne’s birthday with a fancy-dress ball, and it was the tasteless idea of some people to turn up as African tribesmen with spears and little beards. Word got to Browne before the evening was over — a waiter at the Cercle had thought it his duty — and on the following morning instant deportation orders had been served on everyone at the party who could be deported. A number of expatriate civil servants were caught in this way.

For two or three days Browne raved, in public meetings, in the Council, on the radio. He seemed to have gone off his head. He was like a man anxious to stir up a racial uprising. The newspapers at last objected. One ran a cartoon showing our airport lounge with three doors: Arrivals, Departures, Deportures. Browne instantly calmed down. He issued a reasonable statement about his and the government’s attitudes to racial clubs. There was no objection to them, he said, provided they were not maintained in any open or hidden way by public funds; there was no objection to the Cercle Sportif as such because it was no longer a place where ‘decisions concerning the deepest interests of our country are taken over whisky-and-soda’. His outburst had embarrassed many of us. But it did him no harm. It strengthened his position and won him a good deal of sympathetic foreign press comment; his subsequent statement about racial clubs was considered statesmanlike by outsiders and ‘diplomatic’ by his supporters. Poor Browne! Into what a position had he manoeuvred himself? Did he still know what he thought about anything?

There was a sequel. About a month later there began to circulate an anonymous satirical tale called The Niger and the Seine. It was in English but so closely modelled on Candide it read like a translation from the French. Slavery has just been abolished, and the daughter of a French creole family comes home one day and announces that she is going to marry a Negro. Her worthy statement about her motives is cut short by her father, who embraces her. He not only agrees to the marriage but promises to do what he can to rehabilitate the Negro and the Negro’s family. He will send his son-in-law to Paris and pay for his education. All this is done and soon there is established on the island a Negro family of some substance. Their descendants continue the practice of inter-racial marriage. So too do the descendants of the French family: their load of guilt is heavy and their liberalism is tenacious. In time both families undergo some degree of racial alteration. It happens, then, that one day the daughter of the Negro family, now indistinguishable from white, comes home and announces that she wishes to marry the heir of the French family, now totally black. Her father refuses; the air is blue with racial abuse. The girl kills herself. The liberal cycle is over; it has served its purpose; it will not be repeated.

The Niger and the Seine was a polished piece of work, fine, witty, piercing, almost unbearable in its cruelty. Nothing as outspoken had been written about Isabella since Froude’s visit. It brought to the discussion of racial attitudes a brutality that had been tacitly outlawed on our island. Out of violation there had grown a certain balance and order. Now, with the fancy-dress ball, Browne’s outburst, and this satirical pamphlet, it became clear that this order was breaking down. And of course it was the intruders, those who stood between the mutual and complete comprehension of master and slave, who were to suffer.