Hawks, bush fires, heat, envious songs, and desperate children: so far, not much consolation on this safari.
A sign reading Very Big Lion was nailed to a tree near Mityana, where I stopped on my way back to Kampala. Another sign said Good News — To See A Very Big Lion — It eats 50 lbs of Meat Daily. A coastal Swahili man with gray eyes in a grubby skullcap asked me for a shilling and then showed me the lion.
“Simba! Simba!”
Covered with flies, the lion lay in a pen made of corrugated iron, thrown up in a clearing near the road. The man in the skullcap made the beast growl by poking it with the skinned and bloody leg of a dead animal, a gazelle’s perhaps. The lion thrashed but could not seize the meat in its yellow stumps of teeth. I looked into the lion’s eyes and saw the sort of lonely torment that I felt.
“Bwana. Mumpa cigara.”
Within a week the lion had escaped and killed six villagers and was finally shot by the Mityana district game warden. All that violence for the lion’s being in a pen. I saw a link between that hunger and the animal’s captivity — that appetite, that denial. I tried to write a story about it, but there was no story, only the incident.
“Someday you will use it,” Vidia said, though he said he disliked animal stories. He told me that when he was my age, working on his first book, a man had told him to read Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants.”
I said, “For anyone who lives in Africa — for me, at any rate — Hemingway is unreadable.”
“Nevertheless, I read the story immediately it was recommended to me.”
Vidia was still helping me with my essay on cowardice, frowning over it, the tenth version. He said that it was improving but that it would be better if I cut it by half. I nodded but doubted that I would.
He said, “I know when I make comments on it you listen and get very tired.”
That was exactly how I felt.
“It’s normal. But this is an important statement — how you feel about Vietnam, how you feel about your life. You must get it right.”
The problem was language, he said. He was passionate on the subject of misapplied words and meaningless mystification. I had lived too long in a place where the wrong words were used. Africans called Kampala a city. But it was not a city. “‘University’ is a misleading word for this crummy place, and is this a government?” The teaching was not teaching, these were not real academics, the daily newspaper, the Uganda Argus, contained no news. “This is all fraudulent!” The writing by credulous well-wishers about African literature had corrupted the language. He emphasized that I must pay close attention to the words I used and evaluate how they worked. Putting his fastidious finger on the page, Vidia made me justify each word in the essay. “Why ‘fat’?” “Why ‘hapless’?” “Don’t use words for effect,” he said. “Tell the truth.”
“I have said before that writing is like sleight of hand. You simply mention a chair and it’s shadowy. You say it’s stained with wedding saffron and suddenly the chair is there, visible.”
This was spoken at his house, which smelled of fresh cement and red floor wax and new paint; the sun streaming through the windows that had no curtains; the house he hated, within earshot of the noise from the brick-and-thatch servants’ quarters.
“And that is not music. Listen to the bitches!”
Sometimes students brought him their work. He did not encourage them, but he allowed them. He saw the occasional lecturer. Sometimes he was asked a question about literature or the world.
I was present when he told a man with a serious inquiry, “I can’t answer that. I would need written notice of that question.”
After the man left, Vidia said, “That’s what he wanted to hear, you know. He didn’t really want me to answer his question.”
A female student brought him an essay. She had come to his house because he refused to hold classes.
“Your essay is hopeless,” he said. He chose a few examples to illustrate how bad it was, and then he said, “But you have lovely handwriting. Where did you learn to write like that?”
Another student, celebrated as a rising Ugandan poet by Hallsmith, sent Vidia a poem, entitled “A New Nation Reborn,” and showed up some days later at VIdia’s house wearing his crimson student’s gown. These gowns, introduced by the same English vice-chancellors who had contrived Makerere’s Latin motto—Pro Futuro Aedificamus, We Build for the Future — mimicked those worn by Oxford students. The young poet gathered his gown like an older woman taking a seat at a doctor’s office. He said, “Have you read my poem?”
“Yes, I’ve read it.” Vidia paused, tapped a cigarette, and said nothing for a long while. “I have been wondering about it.”
“It is about tubbulence.”
“Really.” Vidia found the boy’s eyes and fixed them with his weary stare. He said, “Don’t write any more poems. I really don’t think you should. Your gifts lie in some other direction. A story, perhaps. Now, promise me you won’t write any more poems.”
The boy shook his head and made the promise in a halting voice. He went away baffled and dejected.
“Did you see how relieved he was?” Vidia said. “He was glad I told him that.”
Vidia rubbed his hands and disposed of other students in the same fashion. I was surprised when he agreed to be the judge of a university literary competition, but he carried out his duties his own way. He insisted that there be only one prize, called Third Prize, because the entries were so bad there could be no first and second prizes.
“Make it absolutely clear that this is Third Prize,” he told the people in the English Department.
Some of the members objected to this.
Vidia said, “You are trying to give the African an importance he does not deserve. Your expectations are misguided. Turn away and nothing will happen. It’s the language again. Obote is just another chief. You call these politicians? They are just witch doctors.”
When the term “Third Prize” was converted to “The Prize,” Vidia smiled and said, “Blackwash.”
“The Africans who carry books around are the ones who scare me, man,” he said around that time.
He was dimly aware of, but not impressed by, some of the distinguished men and women who were living in Kampala or doing research at the university. An anthropologist, Victor Turner, was then at Makerere. You would not have known that this small, soft-spoken man with the diffidence of a librarian had spent years in mud huts on the upper Zambezi and on the Mongu floodplain and written pioneering studies of the Lozi people of Barotseland. Colin Turnbull had studied the Mbuti Pygmies. In the course of illustrating his encyclopedic studies of the mammals and birds of East Africa, Jonathan Kingdon, a painter and naturalist, had discovered at least two new species of mammal and several birds that had never been described. Michael Adams, a friend and contemporary of David Hockney’s, was our Gauguin. Colin Leakey, son of Louis Leakey, was our botanist. Rajat Neogy, the editor and founder of Transition, published Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Nadine Gordimer.
“What should I think about Africa?” Vidia demanded of an anthropology professor one day.
“Mr. Naipaul, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have too many opinions about Africa,” the man said. “If you do, you miss too much that’s really important.”
“Really.”
Later, walking back to his house, Vidia said, “Foolish man. He refuses to see the corruption. He accepts the lies.”