Well, from one state of tense uncertainty and disintegration to another: colonial West Africa. Picnic at Porokorro, first published in 1958, has just been re-issued by Mike Walmer, who very kindly sent me a review copy.
(Photograph of Hugo Charteris from a newspaper archive, possibly the Daily Telegraph, hence the markings; found here)
Hugo Charteris, novelist and journalist, and his old friend Nicholas Mosley (yes son of Sir Oswald) spent three months in 1957 on safari in West Africa as colonial rule was coming to an end. This novel is the direct fruit of that. It takes place in an unnamed West African land, where the British Mineral Trust operates a diamond mine. The administration is white; the actual mining is done by ‘licensed native diggers’, black Africans from across British and French West Africa. The narrator is one of the white BMT administrators.
We quarrel easily here. We all have to be careful – no one more so than Number One and Dickson, who are the most isolated of us all.
People at home will find it hard to understand the extent to which we all feel isolated. [...] It is not merely a question of being surrounded and vastly outnumbered by countless Africans with whom we can only communicate in a sort of baby talk. It is in the very air we breathe. You may say we exaggerate this, ‘imagine’ it, just as one of us sometimes suddenly imagines it is so much hotter than it is and succumbs to panic deciding, usually one midnight, that he can’t stand it another minute. Perhaps we do ‘imagine’ things, on the other hand it is only eight months since ‘last year’ – the riots – when, for 48 hours, communications were cut and it looked as if every single inland European would lose his life.
At this particular moment, the country is in a state of transition, moving from colony towards independence. While the British colonialists remain in charge of security and finance, a native administration has been established to deal with day-to-day matters and to evolve towards a parliamentary democracy through which the country will rule itself after independence.
All of the context is laid out clearly in the introduction to this edition, by Andrew Lycett. (You really ought to read it before you read the novel; however, be warned that there is a major spoiler in paragraph 8...) The novel begins with the abduction of the BMT’s head of security, Roberts, by ‘the Cowboy’ and his followers, a group of discontented native diggers. The BMT struggles to respond to this crisis, complicated as it is by the arrival of MacPherson, the local Provincial Commissioner, on a visit and, by coincidence, of a tabloid journalist, Warner. MacPherson is convinced that with his experience of ‘Africans’ he can easily calm the situation and he insists on going on a picnic to the centre of the trouble, Porokorro.
Porokorro means ‘the Place of Bones’.
So we know things are not going to end terribly well.
I thought this was a remarkable novel for two main reasons. The first is the way that Charteris winds up the tension. He writes in short, fragmented paragraphs. He scorns overly expository passages and leaves the reader to piece things together from the elliptical observations of the characters, many of whom speak mainly in some defunct public-school argot. He shifts unexpectedly, jerkily, between dialogue and the narrator’s perception in a way that is very discombobulating. His sentences are very spare, even flat.
The narrator himself – and I assume he’s a man because almost all of the whites are male and because of his misogyny – is also an enigma. We never learn his name or his job, although he speaks of the BMT as ‘us’ and it’s clear that he works there. Yet he is privy to scenes and thoughts that he cannot possibly witness. So who or what is he? He uses ‘I’ occasionally to speak of himself, but more frequently ‘we’ and ‘us’, as if he is a collective consciousness. Certainly there is something about this book, about the way that the narrator speaks of ‘us’ and observes the action without ever participating it, that reminds me of the choruses in Greek tragedies.
The second reason I think this novel is remarkable is the immense subtlety with which it reveals the utter absurdity of colonialism in West Africa and its destructiveness.
Even during a crisis we remain a very ordinary-looking lot at the BMT.
I think of us at our most typical playing cricket on Saturdays during the dry season, when the grass is bleached. There we sit waiting our turn to bat, under a palm leaf shelter with rather blank, uniform expressions, all wearing white linen, watching the efforts of our two representatives at the wicket.
The light is so intense that even sunburnt faces have, like the grass, a white withered look; and our women are as white-powdered as scones, against sweat. The whole effect is of a party grouped for security, on a raft, suddenly consoled with a mirage of cricket.
In this passage you can see the unnaturalness of the BMT’s situation, its vulnerability and isolation, its dangerous passivity. That image of the women powdered like scones is brilliant: not just are they scone-like (pale, warm, floury) but the scone is a food completely out of place in West Africa. Cricket is of course a very public-school activity and the BMT is riven with social divisions: which school you attended, what you did during the War, and who your aunt is, are all crucially important. In the essentially dreary and soulless world of the BMT, spite is one of the few energising principles.
By taking a narrator who gives a BMT point of view (albeit an acerbic and melancholic one), and is someone who holds racist and misogynistic attitudes, Charteris might seem to risk providing a one-sided look at colonial West Africa. However, the BMT’s cruelty is not glossed over and is perhaps more effective for coming from an insider. Gradually, we learn of the conditions to which the licensed diggers are subjected. They are expected to risk their lives mining, but give up all the diamonds they find to the BMT, and are searched rigorously and humiliatingly to enforce this. Frequently, the shafts they dig collapse, burying some of them alive. Nobody rescues them. Why has the Cowboy abducted Roberts? Initially, it seems sheer mischief-making, but in fact there is a shocking reason behind it.
This is a portrait of a minority exploiting a majority without compassion, destroying the living land in pursuit of tiny, dead jewels; a minority that is unhappy and frightened and peevish, existing in an atmosphere akin to ‘a Thames country club, circa 1938’. It is a fascinating counterpart to The Heart of the Matter and No Longer at Ease, and Mike Walmer has done well to bring it back into print.