The White Father (21 page)

Jackie was day-dreaming. She had come out of her viva walking on tip-toe, flushed and excited, full of hope. The examiners had been terribly
nice,
she said, except for one who had asked her about Disraeli. Now she was gazing blankly out of the window, paying no attention whatever. She had promised to go to the party Edward was playing at that evening. It was being given by one of their Oxford friends to celebrate, he said, his retirement from life; he was about to enter his father’s business.

The meeting began to break up. There was a round of applause, then Shrieve and Adams stood up while people drifted towards the door. Others went up the lecture-room to talk to Shrieve. Tufnell hung back from this group, staring morosely about him, smoking.

“Is it all over?” said Jackie.

“As if you’d even noticed it had begun,” said Edward. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to the great man himself.”

“I
was
listening. It was only when that man started talking about Russian technicians that I wandered off.”

“Shh,” said Edward, “he’s right in front of us.”

Adams fretted quietly behind Shrieve who was being thanked and having his hand shaken. When most of the people had gone, Edward moved up to Shrieve and said, “That was really terribly interesting.”

“Oh, hello,” said Shrieve. He seemed tired. “Was it all right, do you think? Did I stammer a lot?”

“Not at all,” said Edward loyally. Shrieve had in fact stammered a bit during his paper. “I’d like you to meet Jackie Harmer. We’ve both been being grilled.”

“How do you do?” said Shrieve, then pulled himself together and smiled. “How did it go?”

“A formal second, I’m afraid.” For a moment Edward felt the despondency of the morning. Then he said, “But Jackie’s probably got a first.”

“Congratulations.” Shrieve thought she was pretty. She was wearing a nuclear disarmament badge, he noticed. He wondered what he should say to Edward to comfort him. He knew that Edward had hoped more than he’d admitted for a first. He was about to say something painfully conventional when Adams plucked at his arm and said, “Time for tea. I expect you need it after all that. A most lively session. I can’t tell you how grateful we all are.”

Shrieve introduced Edward, saying that he was his assistant in the campaign to save the Ngulu.

Adams raised his eyebrows. “I hadn’t realised there was a real campaign,” he said.

“I don’t do anything, actually,” said Edward, “except deliver messages. I’m just there in case something ever does need doing.”

“I find I need the enthusiasm of youth,” said Shrieve, “at my age. I get depressed sometimes, and he cheers me up.”

“Really?” said Jackie. “You amaze me.”

“You amaze me a bit, too,” said Edward.

“Well, come and have tea, all of you,” said Adams. He was trying to avoid Tufnell who was still waiting to force Shrieve to admit that every country in Africa was going to join the Communist bloc at the earliest opportunity.

They went along to the Common Room, Tufnell trailing behind. Though he looked so depressed, he certainly had determination, as Adams knew all too well. At tea he was likely to be supported by others whose interests weren’t
anthropological
at all. It was a great nuisance that the Foundation had made the subject of the Congress so wide: if only they’d stuck to scholarship none of the unpleasantness which occasionally arose between delegates need have happened. There was really very little in common between the true researcher and the “political expert” who insisted on putting everything into what he was pleased to call “perspective”. Perspective depended on where you were standing, and “political experts” always seemed to stand with one foot on either side of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Adams felt very strongly that the cold war had no business in Africa, and if, as he had to admit, it did show its frozen face there from time to time, that had nothing to do with anthropology. Years among West African tribes had cured him of any interest whatever in world affairs.

They sat down round a low table. Arm-chairs and sofas were as deep as was proper for an academic institution. The tea was served from silver pots, and there were cucumber
sandwiches
.

Tufnell had managed to insert himself between Shrieve and Edward, and as soon as they all had their tea he said, “I hope you don’t mind me taking up the point I was making about the infiltration of Marxism-Leninism into Africa. I know it annoys Professor Adams, but it is very important.”

“I’m sure it is,” said Shrieve mildly, “but I’m afraid I don’t know very much about it.”

“But you’d admit there was infiltration?”

“I don’t think I know quite what you mean. If you mean
there are secret meetings of Communists behind closed doors in the capital, I dare say you’re right. But the Communist party in the colony is almost entirely composed of Europeans, you know, and it’s very weak.”

“But that’s merely a front, of course. That’s a standard piece of tactics. A weak party in the open, while the infiltration takes place secretly in the major political organisations.”

“You must be better informed than I,” said Shrieve. “I’ve never heard of anything of the sort.”

“Oh come,” said Tufnell. “During the emergency two years ago there were endless reports of exactly that.”

“The official inquiry, on the other hand, found them grossly exaggerated.”

“But for heaven’s sake,” said Tufnell impatiently, “everyone knows that by the time the committee got to work they had all gone underground. Six weeks after the report was published they were all back again.”

Edward nudged Jackie, and they both sniggered. People like Tufnell considered their generation incurably “soft” on Communism. The C.N.D., it had even been intemperately suggested, was nothing more than a front organisation for a Russian-inspired effort to undermine the defence of the West. Edward, who wasn’t a member of C.N.D., which he regarded as a hopelessly idealistic and impractical organisation, felt as strongly as Jackie, who marched passionately to and from Aldermaston, that peace in their time was not likely to come through the efforts of hard-faced men doing well out of the cold war. The hard-faced men were all over the place, in the government, in the newspapers, on radio and television, thumping out their warnings that nothing the Russians said was ever to be taken at its face value. Some of them, as Adams had suggested to Shrieve, had been Communist party members before the war, and their faces got harder than ever when they were reminded of it. They managed to imply that it was
somehow
all right: it had been the natural thing for young men of conscience in the thirties to join. Dismayed and disarrayed by political events and clear evidence that the Garden of Eden was
unlikely to have been a collective farm, they now felt, and said, that they knew better than anyone else the dangers of the Communist menace. It enraged them to find that people like Edward and Jackie refused to accept that anyone who had been so wrong once was likely to be right now. An eminent Kremlinologist, whose analyses of every minor change in iron curtain governments were on the front page of one of the more serious papers, was known irreverently to Edward’s circle as Lord Haw-Haw. There was a spirit of satire abroad in England which made the hard-faced men profanely cross.

Tufnell looked at Jackie’s C.N.D. badge and sneered briefly before saying, “I realise, Mr Shrieve, that you believe the Ngulu aren’t going to be affected very seriously even if there should be serious Communist infiltration. But surely it matters to
you
if a government takes over which is inspired by
concentration
camps?”

“You forget,” said Shrieve, “that if Bloaku and his friends ever think about concentration camps, they think about Dr Verwoerd’s in South Africa.”

“Of course, the South African situation is simply a gift to the reds. It’s tragic, absolutely tragic.”

“Tragic for the Africans or for the whites?” said Jackie, unable to restrain herself. Then she blushed furiously.

“For both, of course,” said Tufnell as loftily as his general air of gloom permitted. “For the whole world.”

Adams said, as though about nothing in particular, “Mr Tufnell is an administrator of the Foundation that sponsors the Congress which is sponsoring our whole conference. It’s much concerned about the way things are going.”

“What foundation is that?” said Edward.

“It’s called the Free Foundation,” said Adams. “Not, which would have been more appropriate in some ways, the
Foundation
for the Free. The money comes from that awful drink.”

Edward laughed. Free was inescapable.

“We are indeed much concerned,” said Tufnell. “At the last meeting of the executive of the Free Foundation, the meeting at which this Congress was planned, it was agreed that
the west must be woken up to what is going on in Africa as soon as possible. Which reminds me, Professor, you still haven’t signed the round robin.”

“Haven’t I?” said Adams. “Oh dear.”

“What does it say, your round robin?” said Edward.

“It draws attention to the urgent need for more effort by the Western Powers if there is not to be a wholesale collapse of the new African countries into the hands of the Communists.”

“And who are you sending it to?”

“Oh, the heads of the appropriate branches of government in all the important countries.
Encounter
has promised to publish it, and various other magazines in different languages. The point is to alert the western world to the danger.”

“What do you propose should be done?” said Shrieve.

“That’s not for us to say, of course,” said Tufnell. His hands made their familiar gesture of apathy. “Intellectuals can’t hope to do more than influence. The Free Foundation is frequently consulted about Aid Programmes and so on, of course. We have a sort of list of recommended people.”

“And who do you recommend in my country?”

“Ukurua. He’s the only really safe man, we think.”

“But Ukurua’s a laughing stock,” said Shrieve, genuinely shocked. “You must know that, surely? He’s about as serious a political figure as—oh, the ambassador of Haiti, say. He’s a playboy. He’s just a rich chief who rides around in big cars and plays polo with the governor. He doesn’t even take himself seriously. He’s a figurehead, and he knows it.”

“Ukurua is our man,” said Tufnell, with a certain amount of satisfaction. “He’s absolutely reliable.”

“For God’s sake,” said Shrieve, “if you mean by reliable that he’s not likely to turn Communist, then I suppose you’re right. But I wouldn’t put even that past him. He’d join if they offered him a big enough bribe. He’s only interested in fast cars and fast women.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Tufnell. His hands moved jerkily. “He does like women, it’s true.” He suddenly gave a high giggle. “I like women myself.”

Jackie laughed, a clear peal of laughter that rang across the Common Room. Edward was grimacing, Shrieve was appalled. Adams saved the situation by saying, “More tea, Mr Tufnell?”

Tufnell said he must be going. He said goodbye and joined a group of men over by the fireplace. Edward heard the phrase “policy of containment” as the ranks broke to let him in.

“You got off lightly, Mr Shrieve,” said Adams. “The thought police, as we call them—they don’t altogether care for the name—seem to have required his services. So tedious, those people. And they will try and dominate all the larger meetings. They’re almost as bad as the Communists, I say. They
manœuvre
a subject round to suit them in just the same way. I remember an international conference in Basle, when a Hungarian called Pilarczyk and a Frenchman called Morrelet managed to bring the whole proceedings to a halt by the middle of the second day. One said everything had to be discussed in terms of the dialectic. The other denied, within the terms of the dialectic, that anthropology could be so discussed. I forget which was Communist and which was
anti-Communist
, but I do know that the only useful conversations I had during the whole conference were those held in my bedroom over a bottle of whisky.”

“It’s not a world I know about,” said Shrieve. “Politics in the bush are really so very simple.”

“Lucky man,” said Adams, “lucky man.”

“I wonder,” said Shrieve diffidently, seeing Adams begin to shift restlessly, as though it was time for him to go, “if you might have any suggestions about what I could do to get this constitutional conference to come up with something really firm about the Ngulu’s protection.”

Adams looked at him sideways and said, “Hmm. What are you asking? You think I have influence in Whitehall? I can assure you I haven’t. And you’ve already got my signature on your letter, for what it’s worth.”

“I just wondered if you had any ideas,” said Shrieve.

“I’m sorry,” said Adams. “Let me tell you a story. Many years ago, when I was a young and ignorant worker in the
field, I became disgusted with the living conditions of the people I was working among. I made representations, I made personal calls, I wrote letters and memoranda, and nothing whatever was done. Ten years later I returned to see what had happened to my tribe, to check on my youthful researches, to discover, with what I had learned since, how much I had missed. To my horror, I found that in my absence all my recommendations of ten years earlier had been put into effect. My tribe had water taps, had a tractor, even had a kind of sewage system. They were unrecognisable. They had become exactly like their neighbours. Their unique traditions were disappearing before sanitation and drugs, their institutions were dwindling before the efficiency of the local District Officer. After two months I packed up and came home. And the moral of the story, my dear Shrieve, is this: if an
anthropologist
becomes a social worker, he does himself out of a job. It was a hard decision, and some people would think it an inhuman one: but I decided then that I was a scholar, that my duty was to report as faithfully as possible on the life of people as I found them. It was for others to change that life, as they thought fit. Simply by being present an anthropologist alters, no matter how slightly, the way of life of the people he is studying. He is obliged to make this alteration as small as possible. If he lets his civilised conscience interfere with the way the people live, he is ceasing to be a good anthropologist. The detachment of scholarship is often a very hard discipline indeed. It is a discipline I have accepted. I can’t offer you the very smallest suggestion as to how your people are to be saved. The fact that you act as their safeguard, with whatever motives, is something my scholarly discipline teaches me to regret. I study natural man. Nature is indeed ‘red in tooth and claw’. But as a scholar I can’t approve of any interference with tooth, claw, arrow or sword. I watch. I observe. I record.”