The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,68
who had risked his career and perhaps life to serve the people. He had handed back power twice. If he had failed it was only because he had been surrounded by bad people.
I BEGAN to think I should try to see him. I asked Kojo, who appeared to be able to do everything. But Kojo said he couldn’t help in this matter; and I remembered that politically Kojo was on the other side. Other people were unwilling as well, and my time was getting short. I asked John Mitchell, the Trinidad consul; he said he could help, but he had to go away for a few days. I mentioned my difficulty to Richmond, the man with the unlikely Danish ancestor; and he (of course) at once said, “My father and Rawlings are cousins. His mother is my father’s auntie. This is why my father has dreams of being a politician.”
I think both requests—from John Mitchell and Richmond—got to Rawlings’s office; but it was John Mitchell who, the day before I left, drove me to the Rawlings house for lunch.
The house was in an area of Accra known as the Ridge. It was well away from the centre. It had a big iron gate, and the shady compound had two big neem trees. There were a few other parked cars. A black poodle considered John Mitchell and me, but it didn’t bark. Away from us, near the stairs to the raised house, a tall and powerfully built man in a loose white shirt was talking to a little group. He had his back to us. This, of course, was Rawlings, fitting every description of him that I had read.
I had a moment’s hesitation, not knowing whether we should advance or wait. It was a brief moment, because almost at once a slender woman detached herself from the group and came towards us, waving and smiling. She would have been Mrs. Rawlings: dark, fine-featured, striking in black slacks and a floral blouse. The earlier group began to leave, making for one of the cars parked below the neem trees. Rawlings came towards us. He was built like a boxer and he had reading glasses on the edge of his nose. We began to go up the steps to the raised house. Remarkably, at the side of the steps, among the plant pots, was a grey and white kitten, self-possessed, of great beauty. It was the first happy kitten I had seen in Ghana. Mrs. Rawlings said it was a pet; they also had many dogs. I began to be prejudiced in favour of the house.
The sitting room was spacious and cool and comfortable. There was an empty aquarium with plastic flowers on it, and there were family photographs on a wall: in one of them I recognised Rawlings as a young man. We sat down on leather sofas. He sat on the sofa next to mine, but within reach of me. He called me “chief.” I thought it was his style; and it might have done away with the need to remember names.
He said—and it was like a puzzle, like a continuation of some of the things he had been talking about with the people before—“Eight generals are executed just to prevent the country from sliding into chaos, but you do not take a man’s life to do the same. I tried to rejuvenate this nation. This nation was ready to fly. Ghana was ready to fly. All we did was to empower the people. I say: give the people the right leadership, and they will deliver.”
He stood up and began walking up and down the room. He came back to me and tapped me on the knee and said, “Chief, I want to tell you about language, how important it is. There is a spiritual quality to language, to words. If you use language as a tool to suppress the people it will lose all its spirituality. There is a special quality to the language of our ancestors, and we have lost that by having another language imposed on us. Our mother tongue has historical elements, and words were important.”
He was in an excited state and, like some intellectuals seeking to make an impression, he was laying down the subjects he wanted to talk about.
I said, to keep things going, “But some people can have two languages.”
He said, “Yes. But we are not going anywhere by having two or more languages. If we speak English we must learn to use it