THE WAY TO AFRICA 9

has always seemed an important image, I suppose
that is what I mean, that it has represented more
than I could say. "You dreamed you were in Africa.
Of what do you think first when I say the word
Africa, Arica?" and a crowd of words and images,
witches and death, unhappiness and the Gare St.
Lazare, the huge smoky viaduct over a Paris slum,
crowd together and block the way to full consciousness.

But to the words 'South Africa' my reaction, I
find, is immediate: Rhodes and the British Empire
and an ugly building in Oxford and Trafalgar
Square. After 'Kenya' there is no hesitation: 'gentle-
man farmers, aristocracy in exile and the gossip
columns'. 'Rhodesia' produces: 'failure, Empire
Tobacco', and 'failure' again.

It is not then any part of Africa which acts so
strongly on this unconscious mind; certainly no part
where the white settler has been most successful in
reproducing the conditions of his country, its morals
and its popular art. A quality of darkness is needed,
of the inexplicable. This Africa may take the form
of an unexplained brutality as when Conrad noted in
his Congo diary: "Thursday, 3rd July . . . Met an
offw of the State inspecting. A few minutes after-
wards saw at a camp place the dead body of a
Backongo. Shot? Horrid smell"; or a sense of despair
as when M. Celine writes: "Hidden away in all this
flowering forest of twisted vegetation, a few deci-
mated tribes of natives squatted among fleas and flies,
crushed by taboos and eating nothing all the time
but rotten tapioca." The old man whom I saw beatei?
with a club outside the poky little prison at Tapee-Ta,
the naked widows at Tailahun covered with yellow