fingerprinted. I asked whether I couldn't get the ink off my hands. It wasn't a wish to be clean, I decided after I had asked. It was more a wish to appear calm, unhumiliated, to feel that the events were normal. The man at the table said yes, and from a drawer brought out a pink plastic soap dish with a slender-waisted wafer of soap streaked with black lines. The soap was quite dry. He told me I could go outside and use the standpipe. I went out into the yard. It was now dark. Around me were trees, lights, cooking smoke, evening sounds. The standpipe was near the open garage shed. The ink, surprisingly, washed out easily. A rage began to possess me when I went back and gave the man his soap and saw the others who were waiting with me in that yellow room. If there was a plan, these events had meaning. If there was law, these events had meaning. But there was no plan; there was no law; this was only make-believe, play, a waste of men's time in the world. And how often here, even in the days of bush, it must have happened before, this game of warders and prisoners in which men could be destroyed for nothing. I remembered what Raymond used to say--about events being forgotten, lost, swallowed up. The jail was on the road to the Domain. It was set a good way back, and in the space in front there had grown up a market and a settlement. This was what registered--the market and the settlement--when you drove by. The concrete jail wall, no more than seven or eight feet high, was a white background. It had never seemed like a real jail. There was something artificial and even quaint about it: this new jail in this new settlement, all so rough and temporary-looking, in a clearing in the bush. You felt that the people who had built it--village people, establishing themselves in a town for the first time--were playing at having a community and rules. They had put up a wall just taller than a man and put some people behind it; and because they were village people, that was jail enough for them. In another place a jail would have been a more elaborate thing. This was so simple: you felt that what went on behind the low wall matched the petty market life in front. Now, at the end of the lane, after the lights and radios of the little huts and shacks and stalls and drinking booths, that jail opened to let me in. A wall taller than a man is a high wall. Below electric lights the outside wall gleamed with new white paint; and again, but in large black letters about two feet high, was _Discipline Avant Tout__. I felt damned and mocked by the words. But that was how I was expected to feel. What a complicated lie those words had become! How long would it take to work back from that, through all the accumulated lies, to what was simple and true? Inside, behind the jail gates, there was silence and space: a large, bare, dusty yard with rough low buildings of concrete and corrugated iron arranged in squares. The barred window of my cell looked out on a bare courtyard, lit by electric lamps high up on poles. There was no ceiling to my cell; there was only the corrugated-iron roof. Everything was rough, but everything held. It was Friday night. And of course Friday was the day to pick people up: nothing would happen over the weekend. I had to learn to wait, in a jail that was suddenly real, and frightening now because of its very simpleness. In a cell like mine you very quickly become aware of your body. You can grow to hate your body. And your body is all you have: this was the curious thought that kept floating up through my rage. The jail was full. I found that out in the morning. Quite a time before, I had heard from Zabeth and others about the kidnapping operations in the villages. But I had never suspected that so many young men and boys had been picked up. Worse, it had never occurred to me that they were being kept in the jail past which I drove so often. In the newspapers there was nothing about the insurrection and the Liberation Army. But this was all that the jail--or the part of it I was in--was about. And it was awful. It had sounded, bright and early in the morning, like a class of some sort: people being taught poems by many instructors. The instructors were warders with big boots and sticks; the poems were hymns of praise to the President and the African madonna; the people being compelled to repeat the lines were those young men and boys from the villages, many of whom had been trussed up and dumped in the courtyard and were being maltreated in ways I don't want to describe. These were the dreadful sounds of the early morning. Those poor people had also been trapped and damned by the words on the white jail wall. But you could tell, from their faces, that in their minds and hearts and souls they had retreated far. The frenzied warders, Africans themselves, seemed to understand this, seemed to know that their victims were unreachable. Those faces of Africa! Those masks of child-like calm that had brought down the blows of the world, and of Africans as well, as now in the jail. I felt I had never seen them so clearly before. Indifferent to notice, indifferent to compassion or contempt, those faces were yet not vacant or passive or resigned. There was, with the prisoners as well as with their active tormentors, a frenzy. But the frenzy of the prisoners was internal; it had taken them far beyond their cause or even knowledge of their cause, far beyond thought. They had prepared themselves for death not because they were martyrs; but because what they were and what they knew they were was all they had. They were people crazed with the idea of who they were. I never felt closer to them, or more far away. All day, through the mounting and then lessening heat of the sun, those sounds continued. Beyond the white wall was the market, the outside world. Every image that I had of that world outside was poisoned for me by what was going on around me. And the jail had seemed quaint. I had thought that the life of the jail would match the market life outside. Yvette and I had stopped at a stall one afternoon to buy sweet potatoes. At the next stall a man was selling hairy orange-coloured caterpillars--he had a big white basinful. Yvette had made a face of horror. He, the vendor, laughing, had lifted his basin and pushed it into the window of the car, offering it all as a gift; later, he had held a squirming caterpillar over his mouth and pretended to chew. All that life was going on outside. While here the young men and boys were learning discipline and hymns to the President. There was a reason for the frenzy of the warders, the instructors. I heard that an important execution was to take place; that the President himself was going to attend it when he came to the town; and that he would listen then to the hymns sung by his enemies. For that visit the town had burst into bright colour. I felt that almost nothing separated me from those men in the courtyard, that there was no reason why I shouldn't be treated like them. I resolved to maintain and assert my position as a man apart, a man waiting to be ransomed. The idea came to me that it was important for me not to be touched physically by a warder. To be touched in one way might lead to more terrible things. I determined to do nothing to provoke any physical contact, however slight. I became cooperative. I obeyed orders almost before they were given. So at the end of my weekend, with my rage and obedience, my exposure to the sights and sounds of the courtyard, I was a hardened jailbird.
Prosper came for me on Monday morning. I was expecting someone to come. But I wasn't expecting Prosper, and he didn't look too happy. The loot-glitter had gone from his eyes. I sat beside him in his Land-Rover and he said, almost companionably, as we drove through the jail gates, 'This business could have been settled on Friday. But you've made it much worse for yourself. The commissioner has decided to take a particular interest in your case. All I can say is that I hope it goes well for you.' I didn't know whether this was good news or bad news. The commissioner might have been Ferdinand. His appointment had been announced some time before, but so far he had not appeared in the town; and it was possible that the appointment had been rescinded. If it was Ferdinand, however, this wasn't the best way for me to meet him. Ferdinand, progressing through the world, had, as I remembered, accepted all his roles, and lived them out: lyc?boy, polytechnic student, new man of Africa, first- class passenger on the steamer. After four years, after his time as an administrative cadet in that capital so dominated by the President, where would he be? What would he have learned? What idea would he have about himself as one of the President's officials? In his own eyes he would have risen; I would have got smaller. It had always unsettled me a little--the knowledge that the gap between us would get bigger as he grew older. I had often thought how ready-made and easy the world was for him, the village boy, starting from nothing. Prosper delivered me to the people in the front office of the secretariat. There was a wide verandah all around the inner courtyard, and on three sides the verandah was screened from the sun by big reed blinds. It gave an odd feeling, walking through the thin stripes of light and shadow, watching them appear to move over you as you moved. The orderly let me into a room where, after the shifting verandah dazzle, spots of light momentarily danced before my eyes; and then I was let into the inner office. It was Ferdinand, strange in his polka-dotted cravat and short-sleeved jacket, and unexpectedly ordinary. I would have expected style, a certain heartiness, a little arrogance, a little showing off But Ferdinand looked withdrawn and ill, like a man recovering from fever. He wasn't interested in impressing me. On the newly painted white wall was a larger-than-life photograph of the President, just the face--that was a face full of life. Below that face, Ferdinand seemed shrunken, and characterless in the regulation uniform that made him look like all those officials who appeared in group photographs in the newspapers. He was, after all, like other high officials. I wondered why I thought he would be different. These men, who depended on the President's favour for everything, were bundles of nerves. The great power they exercised went with a constant fear of being destroyed. And they were unstable, half dead. Ferdinand said, 'My mother told me you had gone away. I was surprised to hear that you were still here.' 'I went to London for six weeks. I haven't seen your mother since I've come back.' 'She's given up the business. And you must do that too. You must go. You must go right away. There's nothing here for you. They've taken you into jail now. They haven't done that before. Do you know what it means? It means they'll take you in again. And I won't always be here to get you out. I don't know how much Prosper and the others
