A World of Strangers

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I hate the faces of peasants.

I thought that the day the ship anchored at Mombasa, and I saw the Africans for the first time. The whole quayside was alive with them, their faces turned up momentarily from labour as we came in. In the quiet that followed the cessation of the ship’s engines, I saw them clearly. Heavy, mild, and brutish faces, on which emotion settles momentarily, from the outside, like a fly on the face of an ox, and is flicked away as a fly is flicked away, by an involuntary twitch that is nothing more conscious than the reaction of a muscle. I hated them in England, those faces in country lanes, red and smiling at nothing. These down among the crates on the quay shone black instead of red under the sweat, that was all, and the bloodshot eyes were brown instead of that bright vacant blue, appropriately the colour of blankness, space.

What happens to faces like these if, finally, goaded and pricked as slow beasts must be before anger rises through their turgid patience, they are roused? I could not imagine. I only knew the sharp, jowled, curved, and jutted faces of those shaped by books and doubts and ambitions, which, in anger, take on the splendid horror of Notre-Dame gargoyles. And the only Africans I had ever met with before were a few students at Oxford, and two writers and a painter in London, and they belonged in the gargoyle class, rather magnificently carved by their struggles to get there.

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