Nkokolani, June 5, 1895
Your Excellency Counselor José d’Almeida
Being here, alone and abandoned, I feel myself gradually turning into another Sardinha: more wedded to these folk, nearer to these Negroes, than to my own compatriots. Your Excellency is my only friend, the only bridge that still links me to Portugal.
This week, I felt as if I were once more taking up my sense of mission. The kaffirs brought me a Vátua prisoner. And this act of deference, this subordination, eventually gave me back my tarnished military pride.
Despite his mistreatment, Gungunhane’s soldier maintained an enviable air of dignity. He asked permission to speak, and I was led to understand, with the help of Imani’s mother, that his people viewed the Chopi with the same sense of superiority as we do in relation to all blacks. What is more, the prisoner claimed that those lands belonged to them by divine right and that the natives there needed someone to civilize them. I ordered the prisoner to keep quiet. I hated him not for what he said about those who had been defeated, but because, in all his haughtiness, he was beginning to sound like those who had sent me to Africa.
The news reaching me over the next few days confirmed the Nguni soldier’s hatred of the villagers. I received continuous complaints from the Chopi concerning atrocities committed by Gungunhane’s troops. And the complaints were so many that I became not merely insensitive to them but more and more removed from the victims and at odds with what was rational and just. It even occurred to me that the Vátua prisoner was right: From his point of view and that of his nation, they are not committing a crime. On the contrary, they are heroically building an empire. When one thinks about it, what they are doing is not so different from what we ourselves are doing, with all due respect, and bearing in mind cultural difference. We are also defending an empire, authorized to do so by God and our natural superiority. We also adorn the history of this empire with pomp and splendor. If the Vátuas win this war, the fate of this nation of ours will be fulfilled without our being either avowed or disavowed. No one will have any memory of António Enes. And the valiant Mouzinho de Albuquerque will be a lackluster loser. The State of Gaza will survive intact, with all its glorious history. Gungunhane will survive, the one great hero. This Negro will shine, just as Caesar, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Afonso de Albuquerque once shone. And the statue of the African king will one day feature in the sacred village of Chaimite, in honor of his victory.
I recognize, Excellency, the audacity of these thoughts of mine, which I could never share with anyone but you. And I confess that these ideas have haunted me throughout these last few days. So much so that they made me recall an episode that I thought had faded from memory. Once, on a day off from school in Lisbon, I saw a man standing in the middle of Rossio Square. He pointed upward and announced, in an eerily familiar tone, They are all the same.
I didn’t understand.
The man repeated himself: They are all the same, wherever they are. He was talking about statues. He pointed toward the monument to King Pedro IV. And the strange fellow then declared that the figure represented there was not our king. He was, in fact, Maximilian I, the “emperor” of Mexico. An unknown Portuguese had bought the statue, which was on sale in Paris, given that the aspiring emperor had been shot even before he was crowned. They had saved costs and gained luster. And the man reiterated that statues, like imperial narratives, were no different one from another. This king is walking. But if he was riding a horse, you would see for yourself that even the horse is the same!
For the rest, these recent weeks have gone by as if time were standing still. I can, however, tell you a more personal story, though it is one that gives me pleasure to share. Some days ago, Imani’s father came to visit me. For a minute, I feared he was coming to get even with me over my attempted advances on his only daughter. This was why I greeted him with such bonhomie: Good day to you, Katini Nsambe!
You are a soldier, sir, and you shouldn’t call me by my name. Soldiers aren’t interested in anyone’s name.
So what are you doing here?
I’ve come to give you a litter. One I made myself.
And what would I want with a litter?
Why, to journey through the bush, of course, just as all the Europeans do.
But I’m not like all the Europeans. I’ve got my legs, and I like to tire them out.
You are a good man, sir. But be careful, boss, for, here in Nkokolani, goodness and weakness speak the same tongue.
Then he revealed that, while he was walking through the forest, he thought of giving me a tree. An entire tree, complete with roots, trunk, branches, and leaves. With such a gift, he would be offering me the sky, the earth, and time. But since he couldn’t do this, and, besides, given that I had refused the litter, he would offer me a hen.
A hen?
I had no time to show any misgivings, for he began dragging over a rough wooden cage with a well-fed brown-feathered chicken inside it.
Where you see a hen, sir, I see eggs. And when there are no more eggs, meat. Meat for a week’s worth of curry.
I took the hen out of the cage, and she wasn’t at all frightened. Nor did she scamper off. Rather, she nestled by my feet like a cat.
I’m going to give her a name, I announced, moved by the creature’s gentility.
Please don’t do that, the poor black fellow begged in alarm. If you do that, this hen will never again think she’s a hen. And she’ll invade your dreams, just as you, boss, will invade hers …
Ever since then, I have shared the intimacy of my home with a hen. Contrary to the advice I had received, I named her Chestnut. During the day, I leave her in the backyard. During the night, I shelter her inside the house, to keep her from being devoured by genets. In the half-light of my room, under the flickering light of the oil lamp, Chestnut looks at me with gratitude and then hides her head under her wing. I recall her former owner’s warning, and am amused by the thought that the hen is dreaming, in Portuguese, my own dreams. I hope that, in exchange, I have the same dreams as hers, which are no doubt less oppressive.
Yesterday Katini knocked at my door once again. I peered through the window and saw him standing in the yard, clutching a huge xylophone. This time, he hadn’t brought the product of his craftsmanship as a present. Knowing that I was unwell, he offered to play in order to alleviate my suffering. Music, he said, is capable of chasing away illnesses and ghosts. I waited for him to sit down in the yard, eyes closed, the sticks pointing vertically, up into the heavens. He played a few loose notes as if he were plucking up courage. At last, he spoke in a slow, labored Portuguese: I am going to play the music of the Portuguese …
The music of the Portuguese?
A song the priest taught me. He told me it was the anthem of Portugal.
He immediately started to chortle the words, badly pronounced, but in perfect tune:
The truth shall not be eclipsed,
The king shall not be deceived, no,
Let us proclaim …
I interrupted him gently. I smiled sadly in anticipation of his disappointment at what I was about to say.
That anthem, I explained, isn’t my anthem.
Aren’t you Portuguese? he asked.
I didn’t reply. In these circumstances, it would be better to let the poor man fulfill his generous intentions. And, full of feeling, the man played a curious version of the Portuguese anthem. At first, I was puzzled. But I confess that, after a while, I found it moving. That composition of his began to soothe me. And night fell in Nkokolani with a white man drinking nsope and a black man playing the Portuguese national anthem.
I have at last discovered, my dear counselor, a humanity that I didn’t know existed within me, out here in these backlands. These seemingly remote folk have given me lessons I would never have learned anywhere else. Some weeks ago, for instance, a native of Nkokolani appeared before me who had been summoned to the administration at Zavala, charged with tax evasion. The administrator ordered a sepoy to whip him. It was not the act of disobedience that needed to be punished. What was beyond pardon was a Negro’s pride in fearlessly contesting Portuguese power. This was the impression that remained with me from the unfortunate kaffir’s story, related without lament or complaint.
I understood the logic behind the thinking of our authorities. It was necessary to humiliate him, to do to him what they do to elephants in India when they want to tame them: smash their knees so that their feet will forfeit their dreams. The administrator ordered that he should first be lashed with a cat-o’-nine-tails. At this point, the black proceeded to correct him politely: There were no cats there, whether with one tail or nine. Moreover, that dried-up appendage belonged to an animal known as an mpfufu. If we didn’t have a suitable name for it in the Portuguese language, he suggested we could borrow the term from his own tongue.
It didn’t occur to the administrator that our language already possessed the word “hippopotamus.” And he took these declarations as proof of yet greater insolence. If there wasn’t an appropriate name for a cat-o’-nine-tails, then let him be beaten with an old wooden bat.
I should tell you, by way of a brief aside, that while the kaffir was relating what had happened his face became contorted, and tears filled his eyes. He found it more painful to recall the incident than it had been to suffer the punishment—at the very time when the wood was lacerating his flesh, he remained impassive. Not one single complaint during the thirty strokes. The sepoy charged with administering his flogging was denied such a trophy, and the victim withdrew from the room with his hands turned upward, as if he were asking God to bear witness to the unbearable pain he was suffering. He bade a polite farewell to the sepoy who had beaten him, but he didn’t leave. Rather, he knocked on the door of the administrator’s office and asked, I would like to ask you a favor, Lordship.
A favor?
I would like you to beat me.
Haven’t you had enough?
I want people to see that I am not just anyone. I want to go back to my village and say out loud that, when it was my turn, it was a white man who delivered the beating.
Later, when I spoke to the administrator, he confirmed the story. And he made it clear that he had refused the presumptuous kaffir’s request. That’s exactly what he wanted, he insisted. These blacks are like big children, and they see in us a father figure charged with punishment and absolution. I am not sure that his interpretation is correct. In my view, the black man’s motive was different: to prove the cowardice of those who order people to be punished but are incapable of personally delivering the punishment.
I reproduce apparently mundane episodes such as this in order to highlight our stubbornness in not realizing that the human reality here is far more complex than is presumed in Lisbon. When I was included in that firing squad in Lourenço Marques, I was unable to guess the age of the youths we were to shoot. They could have been children, they could have been adults. As Sanches de Miranda rightly says, these creatures are impossible to read. And this increases our anger at them.
And it is a pity that we are content to remain so ignorant. For it is this ignorance that ensures we come out losers, not only in our ability to govern well, but also in our capacity to intervene militarily. An understanding of the most fundamental issues escapes us, and we consider it right to support certain local rulers unconditionally. These instances of support are, however, precarious and based on fragile, temporary consensus. Only today, with the help of a translator, I witnessed a curious conversation between two chiefs who offered to resolve a quarrel among local blacks. I shall reproduce their colorful exchanges as faithfully as possible. They were debating whether there had been a betrayal in the surrender of land to the Vátua invaders. And they argued the matter in the following terms:
We gave them those lands, one said, but we didn’t surrender our gods, who are the only owners of the land.
Words. Those are just words, the other retorted. We surrendered everything to them.
Are we not the ones who still command the sacred rites?
Let me ask you this, then: What language do our ngangas speak in these rites? Do they speak in our language? Or isn’t it true that we now speak to our gods in the language of the invaders?