VI. RHODESIAN AND AFRICAN AWARENESSES
Before Giorgios, with the exception of a few ‘passades,’ having vowed to remain faithful to John’s memory, I had endured long periods of abstinence.
There had been, however, during the first weeks of the War, Craig Butler, the Rhodesian Air Force pilot. I had served as his private interpreter with the Belgian authorities.
Craig asked me to accompany him to Kamina, the Congo’s strategic military base where all the north-bound convoys stopped for fresh provisions and refueling. He was so boyish-looking in his impeccable khaki uniform and so good-humored, I was stunned when one evening, upon rejoining him in our pension rooms, he locked the door behind me and mischievously slipped the key under the belt of his trousers. He had a smug grin on his face.
“I don’t fancy that sort of joke,” I protested as he stood there watching me with a pout, yet not uttering a word. He looked so cocksure of what was going to follow that I felt like raising a scandal, though I would be the one ridiculed.
He drew the curtains and, staring at me, slowly shed his clothes. Stark naked, he lifted the mosquito net of one of the beds and positioned himself slouchingly on top of the sheets. His young and muscular body became even more enticing as he closed his eyes, moving his limbs this way and that, before he boldly spread his legs.
“The night is all ours,” he said at last, lips protruding in that cheeky pout of his. “And we have seven more before I leave for the front,” he added, throwing out his downy chest.
He was an arrogant and magnificent animal and he knew it all too well.
The vision of his throbbing manhood through the heavy folds of gauze left me no choice. Thinking of John for a split second, I had a lump in the throat. It was the first time I was going to betray him.
Making love to this young Rhodesian had little in common with the wholeness, the almost sacred bliss John and I had shared. I hadn’t sought it. But now I couldn’t backtrack. My instincts had been repressed for too long. And though my fling with Craig lasted but a week and was essentially sexual, I would be a hypocrite to dismiss it as uneventful. It was dense and naughty and quite delectable. But wherever John might be — for he surely must have known —he didn’t need to fear.
Craig provided me with immense pleasure, his touch revitalizing a part of my being that had gone numb. In spite of this I could never have attached myself to him profoundly. The Rhodesian’s playful nature was charming at most. He was overambitious for my taste and, to reach his goal, he would burn the ground he tread upon. But I liked him for what he gave me and I would have been genuinely grieved had I learned he had disappeared somewhere in the Sahara, fighting Rommel’s columns. He was to be admired for his determination.
With hindsight I realize what made Craig so attractive to his entourage and why I too had fallen for him. From the start I noticed his readiness to please. Yet he knew where his duties lay. I remember how serious he became at headquarters directly he was confronted with the battlefield map. Knitting his brow, he would listen to his superiors with remarkable poise and assertiveness. The British officer in command would almost unfailingly invite him to voice his opinion. That was where I entered the picture, for Craig, whose analytical mind had earned the staff’s respect, would then elaborate on the combat situation and sum it up for the Belgians. The discussions could be prolonged well into the night.
Once out of HQ, Craig would resume his youthful joviality. He was an exhilarating table companion, cracking jokes that would have the whole party in fits. He relished every minute of his stay in Elisabethville, lauding the food and the continental atmosphere of what was soon to become the Paris of the tropics. He enjoyed dancing and was quite a flirt, to the delight of Elisabethville’s belles who performed under the debonair-yet-attentive gaze of their husbands. There was — one ought to admit — a scarcity of nubile demoiselles and the Belgians, particularly under these latitudes, had a solid reputation of being bon-vivants, be it around a good meal or in bed.
It was in Kamina, however, that the complexity of Craig’s temperament appeared. The ardor with which he seduced me was followed by a touching and somewhat anachronistic sentimentality, a growing nostalgia as the moment of departure neared. Till the end, his eyes were laughing but it was, I felt, out of habit rather than spontaneity.
***
Kamina, the drabness of the military compound, did something to him. Lost in the Katanga bush, in an eerie manner, the place smacked of war. It was the starting point of the unknown. Craig would talk to me about the happy childhood spent in his father’s tobacco plantation outside Salisbury, about the beauty of Rhodesia and how he was already missing it. He showed me pictures of the granite-topped kopjes emerging precipitously from the hills surrounding the elegant capital city, the orange grove in Mazoe, and of the mysterious Zimbabwe ruins he once drove to.
“I don’t think there’s a spot on earth more blessed,” he commented, with that Rhodesian lilt I now had learnt to recognize.
The morning we parted, he produced from his suitcase a framed photograph with this inscription: “To my darling Craig, ever yours, Gloria.”
“Yes,“ he said, grinning, “I took it a couple of weeks ago when we got engaged.”
He wrote her full name and address on a slip of paper, handed it to me and said with a wink, “Just in case.” That last gesture of his, so unexpected, touched me. A few months later I received a picture postcard from him, taken in Cairo.
***
Craig’s brief parenthesis in my existence stirred feelings I couldn’t clearly fathom at first. There were the sweet melancholy remembrances of John, the fact that he was meant to rejoin me in Elisabethville and never made it, but also something new, relating to my awareness of the Congo, something I had until now only superficially contemplated: my relationship with the Black continent’s foremost element, its people. The Africans are so strange to the Western mind as to appear naive. Having a cheerful disposition — their sense of humor seems innate — they’re considered no more than eternal children. Their natural goodness, taken for granted, is often mistaken for slovenliness. Their tolerance and high degree of adaptability are simply not perceived. The Tshikapas and Mama Malkias of this country could give us foreign devils many a lesson. For they, too, see us as peculiar animals behaving in the most outlandish fashion. I need only to watch Mama Malkia’s reactions to realize how inept I sometimes must look. She doesn’t bother with what we call politeness, really often a disguise of hypocrisy.
The day they will have mastered our ways, we will have to be on our guard and start heeding them. Right now, it’s a sort of monologue we’re indulging in, giving orders and being served. We’re just deceiving ourselves. It won’t be long before the hidden reality is thrust upon us with a might whose impact will not leave us unscathed.
There was a shock wave among the white folk when Congolese workers rebelled against their foremen at the Lubumbashi mining site, a few kilometers from the city. The uprising was played down by the authorities, who had sent the Force Publique to crush it. Dozens of miners were reported killed in the confrontation. To my knowledge, it was the first bloodshed since my arrival. I won’t forget the atmosphere of tension that marked those weeks, a period of gloom for the Europeans. World War II had entered its second year. Gloom soon turned to outrage. And how silent the black population appeared!
But in 1944 a Luba revolt rocked the whole country, although it took place in the far-away province of Kasai. Some settlers packed and left despite the superiority shown by the Force Publique. This proved to be a far more serious case, since it involved an entire garrison of trained black soldiers — they had fought the war in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Orient. Upon returning to their land, the troops, mostly of the Luba-Kasai tribe — chosen, ironically, for their pugnacious temperament — refused to submit themselves to their higher-in-command. Once quelled, the uprising was written off as a purely tribal affair. In the meantime it had spread all along the railroad outposts and deep into our own Katanga mining centers.
The blacks lost their battle mainly because the local tribes, for fear of retaliation, did not support them. However, the seed of an independents’movement had been sown.
The postwar economic boom, which greatly improved the lot of the Congolese, drew a temporary veil over the “outrageous claims of the hotheads,” as the more politically minded évolués were branded.
Frankly speaking, though, in their condescending, overpaternalistic manner the Belgians did more for the general well-being of their black subjects than the other colonial powers, providing a country eighty times larger than their own with hospitals, dispensaries, and primary as well as technical schools. Their biggest mistake was that, unlike the French or the British, they totally and, I believe, purposely neglected the field of higher education, as if, having been introduced to western reasoning, the Congolese mind would forever remain static.
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