Vultures wheeled high above the city. In the street markets, peddlers cried, “Biscuit dae! Five five cents.” We tried out our Krio, “Omus for da wan dae? Omus for dis,” buying pineapples, bunches of bananas, and scoops of groundnuts wrapped in funnels of brown paper. We went to Immigration to get our visas. In the piss-soaked alley outside the Immigration Department, a sign had been posted: URINATING PROHIBITED IN THIS AREA. We found a pharmacy with the improbable name of Vulga Thera.
Beggars crowded around us. Some leaned on staves, their legs like burnt matchsticks. Paraplegics sat in little carts and shoved themselves along on their knuckles.
Pauline pressed coins into the fingerless hands of a burnt-out leper. In the street, a Toyota Coaster moved slowly through the traffic, a logo above the cab saying SWEET ARE THE USES OF ADVERSITY.
Now reconciled to remaining in our hotel, we sat on the hotel balcony in the cool of the evening, drinking tonic water and writing postcards home. The sad-eyed Swiss proprietor, who had run the hotel in Graham Greene’s time, limped to and fro behind the bar.
Our waiter was a thickset man with a coarse-featured, morose face. He derived unending pleasure from prying caps off bottles of Star beer with a grand and sweeping gesture, then watching as kids scrambled around his feet, fighting for possession of the bottle tops. If there was a blue star printed under the cork inlay, you won a prize.
“Fortunes are precarious here,” I wrote to Alex. “We met a deaf mute boy on the street today who thrust a scrap of paper under our noses and urged us to read what was written on it: ‘Good morning I am no hable to spick and I can not find chob Please will you help me Tankyou God pless...’”
I was going to add something about the inescapability of poverty when I became aware that a boy was standing close to me, watching me write.
“Kushe,” I said, and hoped he would go away.
He said his name was James. He had been attending school but could not continue because his family did not have the money to pay his fees. He begged us to help him out.
“Wusai you dae?” I asked.
James said he lived in the East End. His expression wavered between shiftiness and shame.
“Can you come and see us in the morning?” Pauline said. “If you bring your school books, I can get some idea what you’ve been doing.”
James said he would come early. Then he announced that he was going, and disappeared into the street.
“Do you think he’s on the level?” I asked.
“I’ve no idea. Does it really matter?” Pauline said.
A couple of days later, I was lying on the bed in our hotel room reading Melville’s Typee. Pauline was sitting at a desk near the window, turning the pages of a cheap cahier, correcting James’s exercises. James stood stock-still beside her, chewing his fingernails.
“Do you prefer reading books or listening to stories?” Pauline asked.
“I like to read books,” James replied.
“Why?”
“Because they’re true.”
“Do your mother and father tell you stories?”
“Yes.”
“Do they tell you stories about Conny Rabbit?”
“I know those stories.”
“Aren’t those stories just as interesting as the ones you read in books?”
“No, people always tell them in different ways and change them, and you never know which one is true.” “Aren’t they more exciting and interesting like that—when they’re different every time?”
James shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Because you never know which one is true.”
“Are all books true?”
“Yes.”
My ears were ringing. I was bathed in perspiration. I pushed through the crowded streets, determined to finalize the business of getting our Land Rover released from Customs. But no sooner was one obstacle overcome than another arose. Day after day, I trudged from one Port Authority office to another, collecting Customs clearance certificates, import-duty exemption authorizations, set surcharge forms, insurance schedules, shipping notes, delivery and condition reports, and certificates of importation and release. Then there were letters of affiliation to the university, residence permits, vehicle registration and insurance, a driver’s license, more visits to dismal offices where clerks sat slumped over their desks and some taciturn minion would want his palm greased with a dash.
I began to think seriously of abandoning my plans to do field work. I imagined myself holed up in the City Hotel, drawing on my scholarship money to write an ethnography of an entirely fictitious society. The task did not seem too daunting. The Fourah Bay College library was well stocked with monographs from which I could glean the formulaic patterns of structural- functionalist ethnography. To invent a society, one had only to decide the nature of the economy, the mode of descent and inheritance, and the principles of legal and political life; everything else could be deduced. Since conventional ethnographies were generally so devoid of in-depth descriptions of actual individuals, I need not concern myself unduly with details of real lives. Stereotypes would suffice. And sweeping generalizations would gloss over the subtleties of lived experience and give my account an aura of objectivity. Even the language of my make-believe world could be concocted as a dialect of some actual West African language. Hadn’t Jorge Luis Borges done something akin to this in his account of the world of Tlön?
The more I pondered my idea, the more it engrossed me. But when I confided my scheme to Pauline, she said I should not let myself be disheartened by the weeks we had been stuck in Freetown. It was hard not knowing where we were going or what we were going to do, but shouldn’t we give ourselves time to get acclimatized and find our feet?
What brought me back to reality was a map. The map was stapled to the wall of the corridor in the Institute of African Studies at Fourah Bay College. It showed Sierra Leone divided into tribal areas. The research I had proposed at Cambridge for my Ph.D. would have meant living among the Mende in the southeast, studying the impact of literacy on village life. I had never been entirely happy with this plan—a continuation of research I had done for my M.A. on the impact of literacy in early nineteenth century Maori New Zealand—but I had not been able to come up with anything else.
The map showed a region in the north, defined by a dotted line. Across this blank space was written KURANKO.
I do not know why I responded as I did to this map. All I knew was that this remote region was where I wanted to go. I told the director of the Institute of my plans. He said that very little was known about the Kuranko. This was all I needed to make me absolutely sure of my path. A few days later, Pauline and I loaded our supplies into the Land Rover and headed north.
A warm wind flowed through the cab of the vehicle. Grasslands stretched away under an immensity of sky. For a moment I was back in the Congo. The road behind us was lost in billows of red dust.
We were going to a town called Kabala. We were enamored of the name. It invoked the Hebrew qabbalah and its esoteric traditions of cosmic union. But we couldn’t be sure where we would end up at the end of the day. Few roads were signposted, and north of Makeni the road degenerated into a tortuous and eroded track.
We passed through towns where people were celebrating the end of Ramadan. Women danced in tight circles, resplendent in voluminous gowns and high silken kerchiefs. Men lounged in hammocks slung under the eaves of verandas.
We crossed turbid streams where butterflies danced in shafts of sunlight. In the lophira plains, the air was singed with the smell of burned elephant grass.
I