said his name was James. He had been attending school but could not continue because his family did not have the money to pay his fees. He begged us to help him out.
“Wusai you dae?” I asked.
James said he lived in the East End. His expression wavered between shiftiness and shame.
“Can you come and see us in the morning?” Pauline said. “If you bring your school books, I can get some idea what you’ve been doing.”
James said he would come early. Then he announced that he was going, and disappeared into the street.
“Do you think he’s on the level?” I asked.
“I’ve no idea. Does it really matter?” Pauline said.
A couple of days later, I was lying on the bed in our hotel room reading Melville’s Typee. Pauline was sitting at a desk near the window, turning the pages of a cheap cahier, correcting James’s exercises. James stood stock-still beside her, chewing his fingernails.
“Do you prefer reading books or listening to stories?” Pauline asked.
“I like to read books,” James replied.
“Why?”
“Because they’re true.”
“Do your mother and father tell you stories?”
“Yes.”
“Do they tell you stories about Conny Rabbit?”
“I know those stories.”
“Aren’t those stories just as interesting as the ones you read in books?”
“No, people always tell them in different ways and change them, and you never know which one is true.” “Aren’t they more exciting and interesting like that—when they’re different every time?”
James shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Because you never know which one is true.”
“Are all books true?”
“Yes.”
My ears were ringing. I was bathed in perspiration. I pushed through the crowded streets, determined to finalize the business of getting our Land Rover released from Customs. But no sooner was one obstacle overcome than another arose. Day after day, I trudged from one Port Authority office to another, collecting Customs clearance certificates, import-duty exemption authorizations, set surcharge forms, insurance schedules, shipping notes, delivery and condition reports, and certificates of importation and release. Then there were letters of affiliation to the university, residence permits, vehicle registration and insurance, a driver’s license, more visits to dismal offices where clerks sat slumped over their desks and some taciturn minion would want his palm greased with a dash.
I began to think seriously of abandoning my plans to do field work. I imagined myself holed up in the City Hotel, drawing on my scholarship money to write an ethnography of an entirely fictitious society. The task did not seem too daunting. The Fourah Bay College library was well stocked with monographs from which I could glean the formulaic patterns of structural- functionalist ethnography. To invent a society, one had only to decide the nature of the economy, the mode of descent and inheritance, and the principles of legal and political life; everything else could be deduced. Since conventional ethnographies were generally so devoid of in-depth descriptions of actual individuals, I need not concern myself unduly with details of real lives. Stereotypes would suffice. And sweeping generalizations would gloss over the subtleties of lived experience and give my account an aura of objectivity. Even the language of my make-believe world could be concocted as a dialect of some actual West African language. Hadn’t Jorge Luis Borges done something akin to this in his account of the world of Tlön?
The more I pondered my idea, the more it engrossed me. But when I confided my scheme to Pauline, she said I should not let myself be disheartened by the weeks we had been stuck in Freetown. It was hard not knowing where we were going or what we were going to do, but shouldn’t we give ourselves time to get acclimatized and find our feet?
What brought me back to reality was a map. The map was stapled to the wall of the corridor in the Institute of African Studies at Fourah Bay College. It showed Sierra Leone divided into tribal areas. The research I had proposed at Cambridge for my Ph.D. would have meant living among the Mende in the southeast, studying the impact of literacy on village life. I had never been entirely happy with this plan—a continuation of research I had done for my M.A. on the impact of literacy in early nineteenth century Maori New Zealand—but I had not been able to come up with anything else.
The map showed a region in the north, defined by a dotted line. Across this blank space was written KURANKO.
I do not know why I responded as I did to this map. All I knew was that this remote region was where I wanted to go. I told the director of the Institute of my plans. He said that very little was known about the Kuranko. This was all I needed to make me absolutely sure of my path. A few days later, Pauline and I loaded our supplies into the Land Rover and headed north.
A warm wind flowed through the cab of the vehicle. Grasslands stretched away under an immensity of sky. For a moment I was back in the Congo. The road behind us was lost in billows of red dust.
We were going to a town called Kabala. We were enamored of the name. It invoked the Hebrew qabbalah and its esoteric traditions of cosmic union. But we couldn’t be sure where we would end up at the end of the day. Few roads were signposted, and north of Makeni the road degenerated into a tortuous and eroded track.
We passed through towns where people were celebrating the end of Ramadan. Women danced in tight circles, resplendent in voluminous gowns and high silken kerchiefs. Men lounged in hammocks slung under the eaves of verandas.
We crossed turbid streams where butterflies danced in shafts of sunlight. In the lophira plains, the air was singed with the smell of burned elephant grass.
I reached for Pauline’s hand, and we glanced at each other and smiled. “It’s hard to believe I seriously thought of staying on in Freetown and writing a fake ethnography,” I said.
“The trouble with lying,” Pauline said, “is that you always have to make a mental note of everything you say, so you won’t be caught out in the future. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. You are free to live.”
It was then that I remembered the story of Donald Crowhurst and became aware that for as long as we had been in Freetown, this story had been at the back of my mind, casting its shadow over everything I thought and did.
SEVEN
The Magical Power of Words
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS BEFORE GOING TO SIERRA LEONE, Pauline and I had camped in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, awaiting word of a cargo sailing from Le Havre to Freetown. It was an Indian summer, and I should have been grateful for this period of idleness. But our delayed departure only intensified the anxiety that oppressed me whenever I contemplated returning to Africa as an anthropologist. I had glimpsed this future for myself in the Congo, five years before, and it had been in Paris, penurious and disoriented, that I had begun to see that ethnography might be my vocation, my way of entering into
