The Other Shore. Michael Jackson

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      Though I had been admitted to this social circle on account of my color and my work, I nonetheless tried to stand apart from it. Like Sophie, I suppose, keeping from me her thoughts, her family, her village, her name.

      It was about this time that the Congolese Prime Minister, Moïse Tshombe, hired an Irish-born mercenary, “Mad” Mike Hoare, to lead a group of 300 South African mercenaries against the rebel Simbas in the eastern Congo. The rebellion was momentarily and violently suppressed, but it took a terrible toll. As the mercenary columns drove along potholed roads between tall brakes of elephant grass and through remote villages, they made no attempt to discriminate between friend and foe. An African was a savage: stupid, ungovernable, and untrustworthy. And so the mercenaries opened fire on whoever hindered their progress or was seen as a potential threat or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

      With Kasai “pacified,” I was dispatched to the region on a reconnaissance tour, to see whether any ONUC projects had survived the war.

      I remember the stench of death. Outside Albertville, there were corpses on the roadsides. Emaciated dogs fought over the bloated bodies, snarling and scavenging. In the main street, not a building remained unscathed: windows had been smashed, interiors looted, buildings torched. The town was deserted, save for groups of gun-toting boys in ill-fitting fatigues, half-crazy on hemp, who mimed what they would do when they got their hands on anyone who had consorted with the rebels.

      One afternoon, I went down to the lake. Though the dead had now been buried, the sand hills were still littered with shell cases and scraps of clothing.

      A small boy approached me with cupped hands. He was indistinguishable from all the other orphans that begged or hung about us as we worked, except he was alone like me, in a place where no one now set foot, and he held out his hands in fatalistic submission. I said I had nothing, but if he accompanied me back to town I would find him some food. I asked, as one did through habit, the pointless question, Where is your family? And he told me, as if I needed to know, that they were all dead.

      That night he slept outside my billet, and for the next two days he dogged my heels, until it was time for me to leave.

      He wanted to come with me. “That isn’t possible,” I said. “I have to go far away. I cannot take you.”

      As I crossed the tarmac to the UN C-130, he clawed at my sleeve, imploring me not to desert him.

      On an airplane, high above the Katangan plateau, looking down at the deceptively peaceful manioc gardens, red roads, and thatched villages, I told myself that he was better off in that place where he had a life, than in any mission or orphanage where I might have taken him. But he followed me just the same—his spectral presence weighing on my mind—because he had offered me my only opportunity for redemption in that dark time, my one chance to make a difference. And every time I thought of him, I experienced my appalling passivity and impotence, like a dead albatross around my neck.

      Like Rimbaud, I finally found my second self in Africa, though I remained haunted by the impossibility of ever really losing myself in that so-called dark continent, shucking off my first life like a suit of ill-fitting clothes. Strange, therefore, that one of my first Congo poems should use the same image that appears in Rimbaud’s enigmatic line, “You follow the red road to arrive at the empty inn.”⁷

      The Red Road

      The red road led to nowhere I could go

      Nowhere was a village I would never know

      For days I drove companionless along it

      The forest had no horizon

      I wore a mask of red dirt

      The wheel steered me

      My body ached

      At night I lay awake in terror at the night

      People everywhere

      Saw to me with the same indifference

      They shared their food

      I passed through country

      Only on a map

      And came back along the same road

      Nothing in particular fulfilled

      The red road led to nowhere I could go

      Nowhere was a village I would never know.

      It is oft en overlooked by those who mourn or are mystified by Rimbaud’s contemptuous dismissal of poetry that the man who spent much of the last ten years of his life as a trader in the interior of Abyssinia became as well versed in local custom as any ethnographer—acquiring fluency in local languages, “orientalizing himself,” and becoming respected for his knowledge of the Qu’ran and Islamic philosophy.⁸

      As I would discover in the Congo, the red road did not necessarily go nowhere. But to find those unmapped destinations I would have to abandon the purposes that first drove me down that road, and learn to ask directions from those who lived along it.

      THREE

      Kindred Spirits

      HANK KLOOSTERMAN PICKED ME UP at Léopoldville airport when I first arrived in the Congo, and he dropped me off there ten months later. The same hot wind that gently battered me on that first journey into the city still flowed over the grasslands as if nothing under the sun had changed. But I had changed, or been changed, in ways I could not yet fully understand, though an unexpected encounter in the airport departure lounge on the day I left for France gave me a glimmering of what I now know.

      Only a week before, I had been summoned to a conference in Le Royal—the large apartment building that the UN had commandeered as a center of operations. The newly appointed Head of ONUC’s Département des Affaires Sociales was clearly irked by reports he’d heard of my lackadaisical attitude toward the aid and development projects to which I had been assigned. He gave me a choice between “buckling down and justifying my existence” or returning to England. In the preceding months, I had become increasingly disenchanted with the hidden agenda of the UN mission, regarding it as a continuation of colonial policies, but had not had the courage to quit. Gifford’s ultimatum relieved me of the burden of choice. Moreover, I could always blame him for throwing me out, and absolve myself of my indifference to the humanitarian ideals to which my UN colleagues paid lip service.

      I was surprised, therefore, to meet Mrs. Gifford at the airport, and learn that she too was on her way back to England. Her children were in a boarding school there, and she was going to visit them.

      I had met her briefly at a cocktail party when she and her husband arrived. She appeared to be sympathetic to my desire to live closer to Congolese people and not impose Western values on them, and she seemed to have a genuine, if maternal, interest in my welfare. Now, with a long wait for our Sabena flight to depart, we fell into conversation.

      I was curious to know why her husband was not there to see her off, but did not broach the matter. But she was well aware of the circumstances that had led up to my abrupt departure, and apologized for her husband’s insensitive handling of my situation.

      “What will you do now?” she asked.

      “I СКАЧАТЬ