He did not know and we were not prepared to tell him. ‘He is white, isn’t he?’ we said. ‘Let them take care of their own.’ And we smiled and nodded in our wisdom.
I still remember the day he walked into the Officers’ Mess that warm-cold morning – warm when you were in the house looking out at the bright harmattan sun and the many fiery-hued flowers; cold when you were outside and felt the icy fingers of the harmattan wind like the frisking ones of the police search of your body. I remember because he walked straight to me. I wondered about that later. Why had he picked me out of the ten other army officers in the room, six British and four Nigerian?
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Good morning,’ I said and hid behind my week-old newspaper.
He sat beside me, bridging unknowingly the gap between us and the paste-white-faced British officers.
Superimposed on the paper I was pretending to read was his clear-cut image: black shoes, olive green uniform, lieutenant’s gold bar glinting on broad shoulders, face young, tanned, smooth, eyes a merry blue and hair a blond brush.
He tried his best to make conversation that morning but I paid him superficial attention.
He was American, he said. His name was Keith Samborne.
‘I see,’ I said, spooning cornflakes into my large mouth, and filling it up. It was a good excuse for making laconic answers.
He told me he was here to show us how to use the new 106 recoilless rifles we had just received from the United States government. He would be here for nine months at least. He had looked forward to this trip to Africa and hoped I would get to show him around.
The statement struck a responsive chord in my brain. I recalled how many times I had said precisely the same thing to indifferent people from Switzerland to Zaïre, from Poland to the United States. I waxed compassionate as I thought of him as being a kindred spirit … the long-distance traveller. But I quickly squelched this traitorous feeling.
‘I see,’ I said, flashed him a smile and turned to the Nigerian officer by my side to discuss things of mutual interest.
And that was the last time I allowed him to sit next to me at mealtimes. I avoided him in all ways I could, politely, quietly, nicely, ignoringly, rudely and openly.
But it took him a long time to understand that I did not want to be seen with him and that we did not want him as a friend. Armed with a thick-skinned optimism and a belief in the myth of the childlike emotional responses of underdeveloped peoples, he was immune to our innuendoes, and the embarrassed silences and awkward atmosphere created by his presence. Our second party at the Mess finally made a chink in his armour!
Zaria in Northern Nigeria is a small, dusty military town with only one winding, unpaved street. It is poor and in spite of its pronounced social strata there are very few, if any, unattached females. There is, however, a glut of single males. As a result, the British officers shared the wife of the British adjutant – she was the only white woman in town. Those of them who could not make it with her, made do with their young Nigerian batmen. We Nigerian officers imported our women from nearby towns, and to relieve the boredom and the hum-drum of military parades we frequently threw parties in the Mess.
I must confess our first party that Keith attended seemed designed to reinforce his belief in our emotional immaturity. But that was the way we planned it. At that party, we lionized him. We flattered him. We plied him with drinks, delicacies, questions, answers and promises. We allowed our women to dance with him and he danced with the most beautiful most of the time. How the women smiled at him, learned to pronounce his name, were all over him, promising to show him all that he wanted to see and generally making him the sun of their universe!
I could have sworn the stiff British officers on the other side of the room were envious of him even though they did not let on they were. They had already gone beyond the call of duty to make him aware of their intense dislike for him. The adjutant, a normally dour, pudding-faced Lancashire man, had in a Shakespearean flash of inspiration called him ‘the hand doing the writing on the wall’ for the British.
But Keith felt neither their envy nor scorn that day. He was so busy enjoying himself! Once, in the heat of the party, we escaped to the toilet to cool off.
‘Thank you for everything,’ he had said.
‘What?’ I asked.
He did not answer but said, reminiscing to himself, ‘This is the first time I’ve danced with a black.’
He did not know.
I was not prepared to tell him.
He had now driven in the first nail.
A long-distance traveller should rarely say what he really feels or thinks.
At our second party, therefore, we decided to get the message home to him. First, we planned it in great detail, for we wanted it to be the best we had had in years. Then we arranged for it to fall on one of the many Muslim holidays with which we were blessed. Invitations to the few dignitaries in the town were sent out well in advance. The British officers seized the opportunity to invite all their friends residing within a day’s journey from Zaria.
We engaged a live band. It complemented the military band which could only play martial music and waltzes.
A day before the party Keith dropped by my room. He thought, although I did not, that we knew each other well enough, for he said without preamble, ‘Francis, I need a partner for the party tomorrow.’
I pretended not to understand. ‘A partner?’
‘Yes, a girl.’
‘Oh-ho! A girl! But there are no white …’
‘I know. Can’t your girlfriend get me someone? I’m sure she knows lots of girls.’
Using the patient tone one would to explain things to an idiot, I said, ‘Now Keith, I doubt if any Nigerian girl …’
‘OK, forget it.’
‘And besides,’ I said to his retreating angry back, ‘you should have asked the British officers for that sort of thing.’
In retrospect, I doubt if Keith heard me. But even if he had he probably did not do what I had suggested.
I arrived early at the party to find Keith at the bar alone.
As I got a drink for myself and the three girls I had come with, the Nigerian bartender told me Keith had been drinking heavily. I nodded and moved to the extreme end of the room to avoid Keith. The rest of the Nigerian officers did the same on arriving at the party.
Slowly the room filled up while outside on the deep-pile carpet of a lawn the military band played the Blue Danube, a light marching tune as foreign as the surrounding dark-shot-through-with-light night.
Sounds of festivity fed on themselves and, nourished, grew into those of frivolity. Tensions were replaced with an air of abandonment, studied perhaps, but becoming less so with the decrease of the contents of the wine bottles.
Suddenly Keith stood in front of me.
‘Francis, may I dance with one of your girls?’ He sounded sober and clean cut and, by having asked my permission, mindful of the Officers’ Mess protocol.
‘Why not ask one of the girls?’ I said with a little inflected laugh. ‘They are free you know.’
At the last dance-party I had virtually pushed a girl into Keith’s arms. This time, the girls did not know what to do and they threw confused glances at me and Keith. However, my wide-eyed innocent stare and fixed toothy smile soon gave them the clue. So when Keith did as I told him he was politely refused. I could see in the garish light from the imitation chandeliers the blood rise and ebb in his throat and face. The girl who refused to dance with him had been his foremost admirer at the last dance-party.
Even then Keith did not fathom what was going on till he had tried many more times to dance with any of the Nigerian girls and was refused each time.
But through it all his self-control never left him. The only sign that he was labouring under tremendous pressure was the sporadic twitching of his right eyelid.
He left the party early and we soon forgot him in the gaiety of the moment.
I did not run into Keith socially for weeks after that. It did not worry me unduly. I felt he had come to terms with the peculiar loneliness of the long-distance traveller. But I soon found out I was wrong.
‘Francis, I want to talk to you,’ he said, stopping me one evening as I left the Officers’ Mess after dinner.
Silent, we walked to my room. Silent still I offered him a drink. He mimed his refusal. I had a shot of the Scotch whisky and sat and waited.
‘Why have you all been avoiding me?’ he asked.
His tone was reasonable. I tried to match that reasonableness.
‘Avoiding you?’
‘I thought you were my friends,’ he said, ‘but now I see I was mistaken.’
‘We are your friends,’ I protested.
He smiled mirthlessly. ‘I am not that naïve.’
‘Neither am I,’ I said. ‘Surely you don’t expect us to change our lives, disrupt our plans so as to include you in them?’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I cut in. ‘You want us to take special notice of you. You want us to make a special effort to devote our time to you because you are white … and an American?’
‘That’s not what I mean, dammit, and you know it. You are just being intentionally obtuse. All I ask … all I ask is …’
‘A little friendship,’ I completed for him. ‘Why don’t you go to the British officers? They are more of your kind, don’t you think?’
Keith was silent for a while. When he spoke, he was evidently under the stress of control.
‘Francis, if I honestly wanted to meet the British, do you think I would come all the way to Africa to do so? Now you tell me something. Why did you all go to such lengths to make me feel like one of you at the first party?’
‘Oh, we just felt like doing it. It was fun.’
‘Fun?’
‘Yes. I mean we had nothing better to do. You know how it is. We were at the party to enjoy ourselves and there was no harm in letting you have a good time while we did so. I mean, if you misconstrued our playfulness for friendship, it is not our fault.’
‘You mean I was really just a means for you to spend your time?’
I did not answer. He must have sensed I would not for he turned abruptly and walked out. Before I went on to other things I had planned for the evening, I wondered if I should have answered his last question. Would he have understood that as long as the British were around, he and I could not really be friends? Genuine friendship presupposed a meeting on an equal footing. This could not be the case with us, especially in the eyes of beholders.
He would always be equated with the British, the master; I would be the servant, the climber, the opportunist. How often would I have to say that although he was white, he was different from the others? How often would I have to engineer situations so that he could talk in his American intonation and so prove he was not British? How often would I, as subtly as I could, make him wear typically American dress each time I took him out? How often …?
No. I did not relish the role of the perpetual interpreter. It was often a thankless part fraught with frustration and anger. Besides, I was simply too lazy to do it.
A week after our conversation I heard Keith had taken up with a Nigerian girl, or rather the girl had taken him up. We laughed when we learnt her name. It was obvious Keith did not know, and we were not prepared to tell him, that his sojourn with us was about to end.
In any society it is the outcast who first befriends the long-distance traveller. But when the outcast regains admittance into society, she deserts the one that made it possible.
The long-distance traveller is loneliness personified.
I came to attention, saluted and waited to be stood at ease. I was not.
‘Lieutenant Oko,’ the British Commanding Officer said in his usual growl. ‘You let us down.’
My heart sank.
He struck a match and lit a cigarette, a fascinating juggling act. A mortar accident in Java had left him with only one finger on his right hand.
‘We had counted on you to take care of Lieutenant Samborne and you didn’t.’ His tone was more clipped than usual.
We stared at each other for a while. His washed-out blue eyes did not waver, nor did his dark-bluish, powerful bony jaws relax. There was no doubt he meant what he had just said.
Many questions coursed through my head but before I could articulate any of them, he said, ‘For every man you allow to leave your country with bitter memories you have made a hundred foreign enemies. You may go.’
‘Nonsense,’ I muttered under my breath as I marched out of his office.