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Summary: Chapter 8

One evening Indar and Salim attended a party hosted by a woman named Yvette, the wife of a historian named Raymond, who had the President’s ear. When they arrived, Salim felt immediately attracted to Yvette. She wore a black silk dress and proved much younger than he’d expected—she was thirty years younger than her husband, who was in his fifties.

The low-lit ambience and the decor inspired Salim. Yvette had removed all of the European furniture from the house and replaced it with African-style cushions and bolsters. On the walls hung African tapestries, masks, and spears. Salim enjoyed watching couples dancing, and when a Joan Baez sang came on, her voice made him feel a deep part of himself awakening: “the part that knew loss, homesickness, grief, and longed for love.” Salim considered the irony of songs like this one, in which a sweet voice sings about injustice.

Raymond, who had been working in his office, came out to join the party. He explained how his work that night had left him dejected and made him understand how impossible it is to get to the truth of things. Indar and others in the room exclaimed that time and persistence can always reveal the truth. But Raymond rejected their assurances, insisting that too much in history goes unrecorded and hence remains irretrievable to the historian.

Indar introduced Salim to Raymond and asked Raymond to tell the story of how he met the President. Raymond explained that during the colonial period he taught at a college in the capital. One day, a middle-aged African woman came to see him about her son, who had left school in a fit of depression. Raymond agreed to meet her son and found him extraordinary. The boy explained the pain he experienced living in a world where his mother suffered such difficulty and humiliation. Raymond advised the boy to join the Defence Force and get practical experience before entering politics.

Raymond praised the President for all that he’d achieved during his time in office, disciplining the army and bringing peace to the country. He also celebrated the President’s readiness to absorb new ideas and his ability to know “what the people need, and when.” Raymond concluded by declaring that only an African can truly rule Africa.

Raymond went on to describe his current work on a collection of the President’s public speeches, which would outline the development of the President’s political philosophy. He insisted that beneath the increasing nuance of the President’s speeches, the reader would always detect a basic sense “of the young man grieving for the humiliations of his mother.”

Raymond’s final words at the party turned back toward the difficulty of writing history and, in particular, of determining the events of the larger narratives that shape history. He cited Theodor Mommsen as an eminent historical writer. Yet whereas Mommsen, who wrote an influential account of the Roman Republic, knew that his subject was a great one, Raymond had no idea what value his grand history of an African country would have.

Later, after they’d left the party, Indar and Salim discussed Raymond’s speech. Indar affirmed Raymond’s portrait of the President as a chameleonic personality who seemed to be many things at once. The two men walked toward the river, and Salim explained that he had bought Nazruddin’s shop based on an idea of what the town used to be. Indar responded that the idea of Europe in Africa is indeed seductive but not ultimately true to reality. For example, Raymond’s influence over the President had long since waned, and his continued presence in the Domain was a sham. In his mind, Salim recalled images from the evening, recreating the sound of Joan Baez’s voice and the image of Yvette.

Analysis: Chapter 8

Chapter 8 opens and closes with references to the allure of Europe in Africa, suggesting the survival of colonial attitudes in the postcolonial period. When he first entered Yvette and Raymond’s home, Salim felt captivated by Europeans living in an African style with African decor. When the voice of American singer Joan Baez suddenly swept through the African ambience, the sound flooded Salim with emotions he otherwise suppressed. The music of this European-descended artist infused the African setting with a revitalizing, foreign spirit. Salim echoes this experience at the end of the chapter, when he recalls telling Indar that he had moved to this part of Africa because the town’s vibrant colonial past had intrigued him. In other words, the European influence on the town at the bend in the river had captured Salim’s imagination. When Indar warned against this way of idealizing the European presence in Africa, he pointed to Raymond’s waning influence over the President as a cautionary example. But even as Indar emphasized the false ideal of Europe in Africa, European influences persisted both in the town and the Domain. Despite political independence, then, European colonialism may not yet have truly ended.

When Salim remarked on the irony of the Joan Baez song, which featured a sweet-sounding voice singing about injustice, he underscored the fact that the Domain was an isolated and privileged space. Salim initially found the Joan Baez song profoundly moving, and the depth of his emotional response surprised him. Yet he also reflected that the particular circumstances of the party enabled him to have this response. He reasoned that a person could only enjoy a sweet song about injustice if they could assume that justice would always serve their interest, and Salim thought that it was easy to make such an assumption within the secure bubble of Yvette and Raymond’s house. Put differently, the ambience of the party made Salim feel safe, and the feeling of safety allowed him to let his guard down and have a vulnerable response to the song. A less hospitable environment would not yield the same experience of emotional awakening. The effect the environment had on Salim’s psyche makes it clear that the Domain was a relatively sheltered and privileged space free from the everyday anxieties that Salim faced in his everyday life in the town.

Raymond’s struggle to produce a history of the unnamed African country symbolizes the uncertain status of Africa in contemporary global politics. As he explained to the party guests, Raymond sought to validate Africa as a place with an important history worthy of global attention. He had spent his career immersed in research, attempting to reconstruct the grand narrative of central Africa. Yet at this point in his work, he felt beset by gaps in the historical record. Aware that the majority of history goes unrecorded, he bemoaned the difficulty of a historian like him ever arriving at the real truth. And in Africa, where paper records were virtually nonexistent, the problem of historical reconstruction seemed to him impossible. Given the apparently insurmountable issues plaguing his work, Raymond worried that his ambitious project would never have the same impact as the monumental history of Rome written by German scholar Theodor Mommsen. And if he failed to demonstrate the value of the African past, that failure would reflect negatively on the global perception of Africa more generally. Thus, if the world perceived the continent as lacking history, Africa would never earn respect on the world stage.

Both Raymond and Indar praise the President for being a kind of chameleon whose character constantly changes, but this portrait of a man without a fixed position also suggests danger. When Raymond initially described the President, he celebrated the politician’s changeable personality as a strategy that allowed everyone in the country to feel connected to him. Indar echoed Raymond’s sentiments when he described the President as both a chief and a man of the people, a modern thinker possessed of his African heritage. According to Indar, the President’s success derived from this “mish-mash” since it enabled everyone in the country to identify with some part of him. And yet, the President’s apparently fluid identity also suggested that he lacked a clearly defined and stable political platform, making it possible for him to change his opinions on a whim. Such inconsistency could lead to confusion and fear. Indar himself indicated such possibilities when he informed Salim that Raymond had recently fallen out of the President’s favor and now struggled to determine what his future in Africa would look like.

 

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