V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

SO we brought drama of a sort to the island. I will claim this as one of our achievements. Drama, however much we fear it, sharpens our perception of the world, gives us some sense of ourselves, makes us actors, gives point and sometimes glory to each day. It alters a drab landscape. So it frequently happens — what many have discovered — that in conditions of chaos, which would appear hostile to any human development, the human personality is in fact more varied and extended. And this is creation indeed! It might be that I write subjectively, from the order of this suburban hotel set in the roar of this industrial city — once of such magical light — whose busyness does not conceal the fact of its death, revealed whenever an interior is entered and that busyness resolves itself into its component parts. Who comes here? A Grenadier. What does he want? A pot of beer.

The drama we created did buoy me up. It abolished for me the tedium I had known in childhood and associated with the landscape: those hot, still Sunday afternoons when my father wandered vacantly about our old wooden house and bare yard in his vest and pants and sometimes applied himself to cleaning, meticulously, his bicycle for the drudgery of the week ahead. And I will record the private game I played from the beginning. It was the game of naming. I would begin a speech: ‘I have just come from a meeting at the corner of Wellington and Cocoye Streets.…’ Dull streets of concrete-and-tin houses; but it gave me pleasure to name them, as it gave me pleasure to name documents and statements after the villages or towns where they had been first outlined. So I went on, naming, naming; and, later, I required everything — every government building, every road, every agricultural schen.e — to be labelled. It suggested drama, activity. It reinforced reality. It reinforced that sense of ownership which overcame me whenever I returned to the island after a trip abroad: do not think I was exempt from that feeling. Drama buoyed me up in my activity, and there was drama in that naming. Administration had been unobtrusive before. Now we, the chief actors, however powerless, however finally futile, were public figures, remarked on wherever we went. There was drama in that power game, from which I had withdrawn. There was one level at which divisions and alignments were public property; there was another level at which it was possible to pretend that they didn’t exist. Drama walked with us; it was not displeasing. I will claim it as an achievement, though the consequences for me were far from pleasant.

Our energies went, then, on making public what already existed. We were busy. We opened schools which before would have opened their doors to children without much fanfare; we cut ribbons across brief stretches of country road; we opened laundries, shoe-shops and filling stations. We were photographed with visitors from American or German travel agencies, who said the correct things; we were photographed shaking hands with the representatives of a French motorcar firm who had come to assess the potential of a regional agency. We attached ourselves to all the activity of the island and to whatever, in a territory like ours, passed for industrialization or investment,

An English firm began making biscuits. Someone else made toothpaste or brought down the machinery for filling tubes with toothpaste. I am not sure now what it was they did. We encouraged a local adventurer to tin local fruit. This was a failure. It hadn’t occurred to anyone concerned to find out whether local people wanted local fruit tinned; no one else did either. The same man went in later for tinning margarine and was a success. The margarine was imported, the tins were imported. Our effort was to operate a machine that turned the flattened tins into cylinders. We capped one end, filled the cylinder with the imported margarine, and capped the other end. I remember the process well. I opened the factory. Our margarine was slightly more expensive than imported tinned margarine, and had to be protected. I believe the factory employed five black ladies, whom we photographed looking grave and technical in white coats.

Industrialization, in territories like ours, seems to be a process of filling imported tubes and tins with various imported substances. Whenever we went beyond this we were likely to get into trouble. There was, for instance, the plastics business, later the plastics scandal, to which my name was attached. A Czech came to me one day. He represented himself as a refugee from a giant Dutch firm and proposed that we should set him up as the head of a state-run plastics factory. He dazzled us with the possibilities of plastics; and I must confess I was attracted by his nationality. In time he produced some plastic combs and plastic bowls. They were a mottled brown or a mangy blue. But there was something irremediably wrong with his process. Everything he made literally stank. Crunch-time was coming — let this be remembered in the midst of all these adventures, all this activity and drama — and I have no doubt that the plastics affair would have been used to weaken me, if there had not occurred, at about the same time as the Czech was making his getaway, the great news about the bauxite contract.

We had committed ourselves from the outset to renegotiating the bauxite contract. It was our only major resource, and its exploitation, in the late 1930s, was perhaps the only thing that had rescued our economy from total ruin and saved our island from revolution. But many people were not satisfied; there was a widespread feeling that the contract had been negotiated in anxiety and ignorance, and that we were not getting what we should. The Socialist created brilliant pictures of what could be done with increased royalties. The trouble about bauxite, though, is that nearly everybody in the world is a layman. The colonial politician who vows to renegotiate a bauxite contract is in the position of a physics teacher who promises to make an atom bomb for his fifth formers. We were in trouble before we began. We had no knowledge and didn’t know where we could get knowledge. London wasn’t helpful. We wanted an expert; we were willing to pay. But there was apparently no such person as a bauxite expert who was free and willing.

I made official approaches to the companies. They replied with unofficial invitations to friendly barbecue parties beside swimming-pools. They were very friendly parties. The men had friendly rolls of flesh about their waist; they played with balls and dogs and occasionally dropped stern words to splashing children. Meat hissed over charcoal; laughing wives basted. In this atmosphere talk about bauxite seemed perverse, when it came from me, and threatening, when it came from them. A new arrival was greeted; a silent local housemaid appeared; someone laughed at a swimming dog. And I was being told that in South America bauxite, of excellent grade, lay below white sand, which had just to be hosed off; that in Jamaica the bauxite lay just below a couple of inches of stoneless earth; and that Australia was in fact a continent made entirely of bauxite. The bauxite of Isabella was difficult to mine and of indifferent grade. By making too much trouble we were gambling with our future; even as it was, there was little to stop all the companies leaving Isabella, and then the natives could play as long as they pleased with the red dust, as they had done before 1935. Besides, any degree of uncertainty about the future might lead to the abandonment of plans, well under way, for the establishment of an alumina plant. And that was an investment of some millions.

The case was overstated. I was not alarmed. The Socialist continued to express its resentment, but it seemed that that was all we could do. How can you negotiate about something whose value you don’t know? To all our official approaches the companies replied with unofficial invitations. I believe some of the managers changed in my time, but the barbecue, family atmosphere remained the same and our conversations were the same. The companies didn’t want to be rude to us. We were a new country and so on, and they were in our life and part of it — the theme of their soft-sell advertisements in our newspapers — but their line was that there was nothing to discuss. And we couldn’t do a thing. There was no question of calling out the workers to support us. We had no control of that union. Besides, the companies’ workers were the best-paid in Isabella — there was a continuous scramble for jobs with them — and so far as things like housing and recreation facilities went, they were model employers. So there we were. Another message to be taken back to the people, another exercise in leadership.