The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,104

subject. The Voortrekker Monument is not only about the Great Trek. It is also about African defeat and African pain. The Monument is a work of art; it aims high. It took eleven years to build and in the early 1940s cost close to 400,000 pounds. Everything about it is thoroughly considered; yet it is brought low by its subject.

Something like this can be said about Bosman’s stories. They are beautifully done, but their underlying subject is unstated. These people are not only simple country people, but out of their simpleness, their lack of imagination, they will bring untold pain to the Africans among them. It might be said that Bosman plays fair, that in his quiet way he leaves nothing out, and the reader is free to interpret everything. It may be that Bosman is too quiet, in his way. Rian Malan thought he could be compared to Mark Twain. And there is something there. The comparison has to be with Huck Finn’s frightening, absurd father, a wonderful comic creation. But there is nothing as full-blooded as that in Bosman; that full-bloodedness is outside his range, which is more delicate.

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A TRULY great man travelled in the 1890s from Durban to Johannesburg to Pretoria. His journey, in part a modern version (by rail and stage coach) of the Great Trek, was a kind of Calvary; it altered his life and set him on the path of his life’s work; but that work was in India rather than South Africa, and there is no monument to him in Johannesburg or Pretoria. The traveller was Mohandas Gandhi, and the story of his Calvary is like this. He came to South Africa in 1893. He was only twenty-four, and though, because of family connections, he had come out as a lawyer for a wealthy Indian Muslim businessman, he had hardly any experience.

He had appeared in court only once, in Bombay, in an absurd thirty-rupee (two pounds) affair in the Small Causes Court. Nothing could have been pettier, but for Gandhi it was a fiasco. When the case was called Gandhi got up. He should have questioned the people on the other side. But he became very shy and he could think of nothing to say. All he could do was to sit down again and ask for the case to be transferred (for fifty-one rupees) to Mr. Patel, one of the lawyers at the lawyers’ table. Mr. Patel dealt briskly with the matter, and no doubt got his fee; but Gandhi was too mortified to find out whether his former client (a woman) had won or lost. It seemed after this that all he could do as a lawyer was to avoid the court and draft memorials.

It was a livelihood of a sort, but then there came the South African offer from a Gandhi family friend. A year in South Africa, first-class return fare, a wage of £105, everything found. Gandhi had the wit to see that with these terms he was going out more as a servant than a lawyer. He also would have seen that the business folk were getting a lawyer cheap. But he didn’t mind; he liked the idea of the adventure, and he didn’t haggle.

In the beginning it was like adventure: a slow sea journey: Lamu, Mombasa, Mozambique, and then Durban. There he met his employer, and the employer told him he was going to be a white elephant for the firm, since there wasn’t much for him to do. Gandhi discovered that the legal case hinged on accounts. He bought a book and began to study it, and he soon knew as much as he needed.

After eight days a first-class ticket to Pretoria (in the north) was bought for him. His employer thought that Gandhi should have a five-shilling ticket for bedding. Gandhi preferred to save the money, and thought that this obstinacy and meanness brought on everything—though it is hard to see why he should have thought so. And so began the Calvary. Every stop on the way—Maritzburg, Charlestown, Standerton: every name remembered thirty years later when Gandhi was writing his autobiography (though not all of them survive in the modern atlas)—was full of shame and fear and insult, such bad treatment, such violence, that he wondered whether he would arrive in one piece.

At Maritzburg the railway attendant asked if Gandhi required bedding. He said, “I have one with me.” And though he doesn’t say, he believes this started the trouble. Two officials came, and then