Big Men And Bush Meat - The Meaning Of Africa

Arthur Fielding was an old Africa hand who had been everywhere on the continent except Nigeria where he had a No Fly Zone caveat to all his contracts.  Lagos, a pestilential, broken city of millions, native home for scams, schemes, and fraud, was a place that every savvy visitor to Africa avoided.  The city was one big shakedown, from disappearing hotel rooms, to daylight airport assaults, to malarial slums, choked streets, and infernal noise.  

Kinshasa was not much better, particularly since the war in eastern Congo fought over rare earths was never contained, and Hutu gangs and their Congolese claques roamed with impunity through the streets of the capital; but Arthur, tempted by a six figure, short-term contract with guaranteed security and problem-free passage, went there for Aramco. 

The rest - the Sahel, the coasts, the Southern tier, the eastern mountains, and of course Mediterranean North Africa - were negotiable and, with the right connections, could be reasonable affairs, pleasant hotels, French restaurants, and beautiful Fulani escorts.  

The Nile Perch from Lake Tanganyika - succulent, mild, and flavorful - alone was worth the trip to Burundi, a quiet settled place after the bloody genocidal wars of the 80s, and the Mille Collines hotel, former asylum for Tutsi refugees of the Rwandan civil war, and a pleasant, breezy place with a view of hills, was comfortable and pleasant. 

'Big men and bush meat' was the African trope - a place of dictators, autocrats, and presidents-for-life ruling Paleolithic tribal millions, profiting from billions in natural resource reserves, unconcerned with social welfare, only civil obedience. Nations of pestilential slums, impenetrable jungles, spare, semi-desert wastelands, and rough, dangerous seas. 

On a recent trip to Bamenda, in the northern English-speaking province of Cameroon, Arthur and an African colleague stopped for lunch at a small, native food stall - the kind seen throughout Africa, cauldrons boiling over wood fires in the shade of a banyan tree, cracked china, broken silverware, and warm beer. 

They didn't order - it wasn't a menu kind of place - and the food came quickly, ladled out of one of the bubbling pots in the courtyard, a dish of some kind of meat in a thick sauce.  'Bush meat', his colleague said, monkeys in this part of the jungle where they were everywhere, a nuisance, and better off eaten; or upriver crocodiles - voracious and aggressive and again better in the pot than on village  river banks; or pythons further in the jungle, or giant land lizards. 

'Don't ask, just eat', said the African. 'Very delicious'. A metaphor for Africa, Arthur thought, a tribal place centuries behind Asia and Europe. 

'So be it' was Arthur's meme, an easygoing detachment and ambition to take the best from the continent, as little and spare as it might be.  The Independence, a five-star hotel built in the capital of one of Africa's most despotic and brutal regimes, had no European peers.  Its Carrera marble floors, Venetian gold chandeliers and sconces, its spacious rooms, attentive staff, and Parisian food were unparalleled, and the President spared no expense to create a world class hotel for the European and American investors bidding for the rights to the country's vast mineral wealth. 

It became Arthur's second home, a palatial asylum far from Washington and the Bethesda suburbs, the sybaritic east as Enobarbus called Cleopatra's Alexandria.  He was happy there.  The hotel was built on a hill facing the sea, high above Cite Paradis, a sprawling, nasty, pestilential slum that covered half the city but invisible to the guests of the Independence who from their balconies could look out over the ocean or the jungle that extended inland for a thousand miles. 

Bush meat and big men were only afterthoughts. What went on outside the grounds of the hotel was a chimera, a reality show, an impossible retainer of an existence that had disappeared long ago everywhere else in the world.  This impossible luxury - an oxymoronic, illogical counterpoint to the jungle - was no show, but a great symbolic, inverted vision.  

Arthur had no qualms about staying there, minutes drive from Cite Paradis which disappeared completely once the doors to the Italianate lobby were opened and the rush of chilled, lightly scented air met him as he walked in. 

Which is why Africa has such philosophical appeal.  Here where it all began, deep in the rainforest, there are tribes closer to Lucy and the first human beings than to Shenzhen.  

Perhaps the most canny observer of the African conundrum - or better, the conflicting mystery of the place - was Josef Conrad whose Heart of Darkness explored the nature of primitivism, its window on the soul, its essential, unavoidable place in human nature, and its ubiquity.  

 

Kurtz in the moments before dying says, 'The horror...the horror'.  He has lived among tribal cannibals for years as the manager of an ivory trade in the middle of the African jungle.  He is at once attracted to and repelled by the tribal primitivism that he witnesses - a seemingly inchoate paganism, an impossibly primitive, cannibalism - and cannot turn away.  If only he had such access to the most violent and primitive parts of himself of his human nature, he could be a shaman, a powerful tribal chief, an African European of immense authority. 

He tries, takes on the trappings of tribalism, tries to empathize, learn, and take on the unholiest aspects of ceremony and ritual, only to be left alone, faced not only with the corrosive nature of the cannibals around him but with his own depraved nature; and worst of all with the knowledge that we all are no different from the wild, painted savages dancing around the fire. 

Staying at the Independence surrounded by the slums and the jungles of Africa was a reverse Heart of Darkness, an attempt to make sense out of primitivism and its seeming permanence through irony or some kind of existential distance.  Which was more real, the jungle or the Independence? How absurdly ironic if Conrad and Kurtz were right - that human nature is not a thing of good, or at least of promise, but a permanently debased and destructive one - and if so, wasn't luxury, splendor, and pleasure the anodyne? or a countervailing feature? Or an inverted but expected reaction to 'the horror'?

Africa does that to people, just like it did to Conrad, attracts and repels with its primitivism and its horror, the need to know, the apprehension, the tentative inquisitiveness about origins; but Arthur was not an obsessive person.  A glimpse was enough, penetration not necessary, curiosity tempered by ease.

The big man remained in power for as long as Arthur visited Africa, so his experience was always the same, pleasurable, unconcerned matter it always had been; and he turned down far more lucrative contracts to be in his heart of darkness