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Summary: Chapter 4

Salim went to the lycée to return the stolen ledger to Father Huismans, the Belgian priest who ran the school. Another Belgian man greeted him and explained that Father Huismans had traveled to the bush. The young man in the office complained about the African students, and he bemoaned the African food served at the school. Salim thought the man looked like he was starving. When Salim returned to the school a week later, he wasn’t surprised to learn that the young man had left on the steamer two days prior.

Salim describes Father Huismans, who was in his forties at the time and had just returned from the bush with a mask and a wood carving. Father Huismans collected various carved implements used in local religions. Echoing the school’s motto, Father Huismans declared, “ semper aliquid novi,” then explained to Salim that this was part of a longer Latin phrase meaning, “out of Africa always something new.” Salim wondered how a Christian man could have such a fascination with African religion, but he also appreciated Father Huismans’s sense of Africa as a place full of wonderful things.

Father Huismans explained the town’s official motto: Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi, meaning, “He approves of the mingling of the peoples and their bonds of union.” These words were carved on a monument established to celebrate sixty years of the colonial steamer service on the river. Father Huismans described how these words came from a poem about the first Roman hero, who spent some time on the African coast on the way to Italy. In the poem, the hero thinks about remaining in Africa, but then the gods, not wanting Romans and Africans to intermingle, usher the hero onward to Italy. The town’s motto reversed this meaning.

Salim posits that the Latin motto helped Father Huismans see himself in the vast sweep of history that brought European civilization to the continent. Father Huismans believed in the superiority of European civilization and celebrated the accomplishments of colonialism. Yet he also recognized that colonialism instigated the death of “true Africa.”

Summary: Chapter 5

Africans from local villages gradually started moving to the town. Then, suddenly, there came a rumor of war. Salim saw the new threat of violence as part of an ongoing cycle of war and peace that had started with the uprising that immediately followed independence. To curb the violence, the President sent an army of white mercenaries to the town.

Salim felt caught between the African rebels and the government’s armed forces, and his fear of both sides led him to remain neutral in the war. As tensions rose, Salim felt increasingly unsettled. He believed that his status as a foreigner placed him at a disadvantage to local Africans, whom he thought better prepared to cope with the suffering to come.

Salim found comfort in providing Ferdinand with a safe place to live during the troubles. He also took lunch at the home of his friends Mahesh and Shoba, an Indian couple who had lived in the town since before independence. Mahesh insisted that the only thing to do in such a time was simply to “carry on.” Shoba, however, complained that she’d spent her whole life carrying on and didn’t think that strategy amounted to much.

Under the President’s orders, the mercenaries went to meet the leaders of the rebel army and shot them all. News of these executions sparked terror in the town and the surrounding region, but Salim felt that the President’s action would succeed by making people feel both confused and nervous. Soon afterward, a fighter jet flew over the town and dropped missiles in the bush, bringing a swift and definitive end to the violence. Defeated and disarmed, the local rebels still harbored rage, but they soon resumed their dependence on the town.

Shortly after the rebellion, Father Huismans was murdered on a trip to the bush. Salim was shocked by his gruesome death and mourned his loss, but no one else paid much attention. As peace set in, more foreigners came to town. An American visitor showed an interest in Father Huismans’s museum of masks and one day disappeared having pillaged much of the collection.

Analysis: Chapters 4–5

The two Latin mottos that appear in Chapter 4 demonstrate how colonialism framed its understanding of Africa from a European perspective. The first motto Salim mentions belongs to the European secondary school in town, the uniforms of which contain the phrase, semper aliquid novi. As Father Huismans explained, this phrase abbreviates a longer motto meaning, “out of Africa always something new.” In the postcolonial African context, these words from the Roman historian Pliny the Elder implicitly reference how European powers looked on Africa as a continent rich in natural resources. The desire to exploit those resources formed a major justification for European colonialism. The second motto Salim mentions refers to the town. This motto, which expresses approval of the intermingling of different peoples, comes from the poet Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid. As Father Huismans explained, the original text expressed disapproval, not approval, of the mingling of Africans and Europeans. This judgment led Virgil’s hero to leave Africa and found the city of Rome, the center of Europe’s first empire. By contrast, the altered version of the motto celebrates the mingling of different peoples and thus implicitly justifies the expansion of European empire into Africa.

Father Huismans showcased a troubling and deeply ambivalent attitude toward Africa. On one hand, he had an enduring fascination with African religion. This fascination led him to make journeys into the bush, where he interacted with different tribes and collected implements that played important roles in their religious practices. On the other hand, Father Huismans maintained a belief in the superiority of European civilization. Salim posits that this belief allowed him to justify his own presence in Africa. This belief also furnished him with the entitlement necessary to believe that his collection of African religious carvings represented an attempt to save the “true Africa” that was in the process of dying out. In this sense, Father Huismans posited himself as saving the best parts of a dying and otherwise inferior culture. Yet it remains unclear what methods he used to pursue this work. Salim emphasizes that Father Huismans only collected pieces actively used in spiritual practices, which suggests that he may have stolen some or all of the carvings, symbolically echoing Europe’s plunder of African resources.

The respect Salim showed for Father Huismans once again underscores his European bias. In Chapter 2, Salim expressed how his sense of identity depended greatly on books written by European historians and stamps produced by the British colonial government. That is, he relied on European material culture to understand the history of Indian Ocean peoples as well as his own cultural inheritance. Yet this same reliance also caused Salim to see himself as an outsider, which had both negative and positive implications for his psyche. It was negative since it made him feel displaced, a non-African living in Africa. But it was also positive because his reliance on and affection for European influence made him feel superior to Africans. In Chapters 4 and 5, Salim’s intense fascination with Father Huismans shows him once again relying on European influence to make sense of his own position, and this fascination also had negative and positive implications. On one hand, it revived Salim’s feelings of alienation and displacement. But on the other hand, it helped him believe that the town would once again become a bustling center for trade that could launch him into a successful future. Salim thus depended on the European priest for a vision of own salvation.

Chapter 5 contains the novel’s first references to the President of the unnamed African country, and these references show early signs of the leader’s later abuses of power. Salim relates that when local rebels began to instigate violence in and around the town, the President sent a group of white mercenaries to contain the violence. Instead of making any attempt to defuse the situation peacefully, the mercenaries—on the President’s orders—executed the rebel leaders in cold blood. Swiftly following these executions, military jets dropped missiles on rebel strongholds in the bush and brought the rebellion to a sudden, violent end. The President’s strategy for handling the rebel situation showed a willingness even early in his career to mobilize military might against his own people. As Salim reflected at the time, the President’s strategy stabilized the situation by shocking the citizens of the town and its surroundings into a state of confusion and fear. Surprised by what had just happened and unsure about what might happen next, Salim and others felt paralyzed in the aftermath of the President’s display of his own power.

 

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