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In good times or bad we lived with the knowledge that we were expendable, that our labour might at any moment go to waste, that we ourselves might be smashed up; and that others would replace us. To us that was the painful part, that others would come at the better time.

This quotation, in which Salim expresses deep feelings of self-pity, appears in Chapter 6. Salim opens the chapter by discussing the image of a column of ants marching determinedly along a single path. He notes how any ants that might straggle from the main column would be left behind to die, their absences unnoticed and their deaths unmarked. Salim uses this analogy to explain why no one seemed to care about the grisly murder of Father Huismans. When Salim says “we” in this quotation, he refers to those individuals who, like Huismans, live in Africa but are not of Africa—in other words, foreigners. Like the column of ants, the foreign community in the town simply carried on after the priest’s murder. Father Huismans was merely a straggler whose death represented no great disturbance in the broader sweep of the “great historical process.” But Salim was more disturbed by Father Huismans’s death than others in the community. He felt like he, too, was a straggler who was in danger of an unmarked passing.

Salim also believed that with African nations gaining their independence, all foreigners still living on the continent should now be considered stragglers. In the grand scheme of African history’s passage from tradition to modernity, non-Africans were ultimately unimportant and likely to be forgotten. He counts himself among those foreigners who have no physical place to truly call home. Not fully belonging anywhere, these people are everywhere expendable. Like straggling ants, they live only to die and be replaced by others. Salim’s image of his own expendability reveals a sense of self-pity at having been born at the wrong time. He feels he had the misfortune of being thrown into the world at a bad historical moment, and it pains him deeply to think that others would be born in better, more stable periods. Thus, Salim’s words here express a fundamental sense of self-pitying grief.

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