first day—that picture of the road and the Africans walking was always with me—and wondered that the land had been tamed in this way, that such a reasonable life could be extracted from such an unpromising landscape, that blood, in some way, had been squeezed out of stone.
It would have been different sixty or seventy years before, when Ana's grandfather had arrived to take over the immense tract of land he had been granted by a government that felt its own weakness and was anxious—in the face of the restless power and greater populations of Britain and Germany—to occupy the African colony it claimed. The town would have been the roughest little coastal settlement with a population of black Arabs, people produced by a century and more of racial mixing. The road inland would have been a dirt track. Everything would have been transported by cart at two miles an hour. The journey I did now in an hour would have taken two days. The estate house would have been very simple, not too different from the African huts, but done with timber and corrugated iron and nails and metal hinges, everything sent up by ship from the capital and then put into carts. There would have been no electric light, no wire-netting screen against mosquitoes, no water except the rain-water that ran off the roof. To live there would have been to live with the land, month after month, year after year, to live with the climate and diseases, and to depend completely on the people. It was not easy to imagine. Just as no man can truly wish to be somebody else, since no man can imagine himself without the heart and mind he has been granted, so no man of a later time can really know what it was like to live on the land in those days. We can judge only by what we know. Ana's grandfather, and all the people he knew, would have known only what they had. They would have been content to live with that.
All down the coast, the Arabs of Muscat and Oman, the previous settlers, had become fully African. They had ceased to be Arabs and were known locally only as Mohammedans. Ana's grandfather, living that hard life in that hard country, and knowing no other, had himself become half African, with an African family. But while for the African Arabs of the coast history had not moved for generations, and they had been allowed to stay what they had become, history began unexpectedly to quicken around Ana's grandfather. There was the great 1914 war in Europe. Ana's grandfather made a fortune then. More settlers came out to the country; the capital developed; there were trams, with white people (and Goans) at the front and Africans at the back, behind a canvas barrier. Ana's grandfather wished, in this period, to recover the European personality he had shed. He sent his two half-African daughters to Europe to be educated; it was no secret that he wished them to marry Portuguese. And he built his big estate house, with white concrete walls and red concrete floors. There was a big garden at the front and side, and a line of verandahed guest rooms running off the main verandah at the back. Each guest room had its own big bathroom with the fittings of the day. The servants' quarters were extensive; they were at the very back. He bought the fine colonial furniture that was still around us. We slept in his bedroom, Ana and I, on his high carved bed. If it was hard to enter the personality of the man who had become half African, it was harder to be at ease with this later personality, which should have been more approachable. I always felt a stranger in the house. I never got used to the grandeur; the furniture seemed strange and awkward right to the end.
And, with my background, always in such a situation scratching at me, I couldn't forget the Africans. Ana's grandfather, and the others, and the priests and nuns of the frightening pretty foreign mission, old-fashioned in style, that had been set down, just like that, in the open, bare land, all of these people would have thought the right thing was to bend Africans to their will, to fit them for the new way. I wondered how they had set about that, and was afraid to ask. Yet somehow the Africans had stayed themselves, with many