during the night.’
The Minister made a sudden movement, wagging one finger sideways. Daondo glanced at him before saying, ‘It will not be necessary to move through Port Luard at night, Mister Kemp. We prefer you to make the move in daylight.’
‘It will disrupt your traffic flow considerably,’ said Kemp in some surprise.
‘That is of little consequence. We can handle it.’ Daondo bent over the map. ‘I see your route lies through Independence Square.’
‘It’s really the only way,’ said Kemp defensively. ‘It would be quite impossible to move through this tangle of narrow streets on either side without a great deal of damage to buildings.’
‘I quite agree,’ said Daondo. ‘In fact, had you not suggested it we would have asked you to go through the Square ourselves.’
This appeared to come as a wholly novel idea to Kemp. I could see he was thinking of the squalls of alarm from the London Metropolitan Police had he suggested pushing a 300-ton load through Trafalgar Square in the middle of the rush hour. Wherever he’d worked in Europe, he had been bullied, harassed and crowded into corners and sent on his way with the stealth of a burglar.
He paused to take this in with one finger still on the map. ‘There’s another very real difficulty here, though. This big plinth in the middle of the avenue leading into the Square. It’s sited at a very bad angle from our point of view – we’re going to have a great deal of difficulty getting around it. I would like to suggest –’
The Minister interrupted him with an unexpected deep-bellied, rumbling chuckle but his face remained bland. Daondo was also smiling and in his case too the smile never reached his eyes. ‘Yes, Mister Kemp, we see what you mean. I don’t think you need trouble about the plinth. We will have it removed. It will improve the traffic flow into Victory Avenue considerably in any case.’
Kemp and Sutherland exchanged quick glances. ‘I … I think it may take time,’ said Sutherland. ‘It’s a big piece of masonry.’
‘It is a task for the army,’ said Kigonde and turned to Sadiq. ‘See to it, Captain.’
Sadiq nodded and made quick notes. The discussion continued, the exit from Port Luard was detailed and the progress through Lasulu dismissed, for all its obvious difficulties to us, as a mere nothing by the Nyalans. About an hour later, after some genteel refreshment, we were finally free to go our way. We all went up to my hotel room and could hardly wait to get there before indulging in a thorough postmortem of that extraordinary meeting. It was generally agreed that no job had ever been received by the local officials with greater cooperation, any problem melting like snowflakes in the steamy Port Luard sunshine. Paradoxically it was this very ease of arrangement that made us all most uneasy, especially Basil Kemp.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, not for the first time. ‘They just love us, don’t they?’
‘I think you’ve put your finger on it, Basil,’ I said. ‘They really need us and they are going all out to show it. And they’re pretty used to riding roughshod over the needs and wishes of their populace, assuming it has any. They’re going to shove us right down the middle in broad daylight, and the hell with any little obstacles.’
‘Such as the plinth,’ said Sutherland and we both laughed.
Kemp said, ‘I think I missed something there. A definite undercurrent. I must say I haven’t looked at this thing too closely myself – what is it anyway – some local bigwig?’
Sutherland chuckled. ‘I thought old Ousemane would split his breeches. There’s a statue of Maro Ofanwe still on that plinth: thirty feet high in bronze, very heroic. Up to now they’ve been busy ignoring it, as it was a little too hefty to blow up or knock down, but now they’ve got just the excuse they want. It’ll help to serve notice that they don’t want any more strong men about, in a none too subtle sort of way. Ofanwe was an unmitigated disaster and not to be repeated.’
During the next few days I got on with my job, which mainly consisted of trying to find out what my job was. I talked with various members of the Government and had a special meeting with the Minister of Finance which left us both happy. I also talked to journalists in the bars, one or two businessmen and several other expatriates from Britain who were still clinging on to their old positions, most of them only too ready to bewail the lost days of glory. I gleaned a lot, mostly of misinformation, but slowly I was able to put together a picture which didn’t precisely coincide with that painted by Shelford back in London.
I was also made an honorary member of the Luard Club which, in colonial days, had strictly white membership but in these times had become multi-racial. There were still a number of old Africa hands there as well, and from a couple of them I got another whiff of what might be going bad in Nyala.
In the meantime Kemp and Sutherland were getting on with their business, to more immediate ends. On the morning the first big load was to roll I was up bright and early, if not bushy tailed. The sun had just risen and the temperature already in the eighties when I drove to the docks to see the loaded rig. I hadn’t had much chance to talk to Kemp and while I doubted that this was the moment, I had to pin him down to some time and place.
I found him and Sutherland in the middle of a small slice of chaos, both looking harassed as dozens of men milled around shouting questions and orders. They’d been at it for a long time already and things were almost ready to go into action. I stared in fascination at what I saw.
The huge rig wasn’t unfamiliar to me but it was still a breathtaking sight. The massive towing trucks, really tractors with full cab bodies, stood at each end of the flat-bed trailer onto which the transformer had been lowered, inch by painful inch, over the previous few hours. Around it scurried small dockside vehicles, fork-lift trucks and scooters, like worker ants scrambling about their huge motionless queen. But what fascinated and amused me was the sight of a small platoon of Nyalan dock hands clambering about the actual rig itself, as agile and noisy as a troop of monkeys, busy stringing yards of festive bunting between any two protruding places to which they could be tied. The green and yellow colours of the Nyalan flag predominated, and one of them was being hauled up a jackstaff which was bound to the front tractor bumpers. No wonder that Kemp looked thunderstruck and more than a little grim.
I hurried over to him, and my arrival coincided with that of Mr Daondo, who was just getting out of a black limousine. Daondo stood with hands on hips and gazed the length of the enormous rig with great satisfaction, then turned to us and said in a hearty voice, ‘Well, good morning, gentlemen. I see everything is going very well indeed.’
Kemp said, ‘Good morning, Mister Daondo – Neil. May I ask what –’
‘Hello, Basil. Great day for it, haven’t we? Mister Daondo, would you excuse us for just one moment? I’ve got your figures here, Basil …’
Talking fast, waving a notebook, and giving him no time to speak, I managed to draw Kemp away from Daondo’s side, leaving the politician to be entertained for a moment by John Sutherland.
‘Just what the hell do they think they’re doing?’ Kemp was outraged.
‘Ease off. Calm down. Can’t you see? They’re going to put on a show for the people – that’s what this daylight procession has been about all along. The power
