The Disillusioned African

PART TWO

68 PART TWO 69 House QK, 196 Cromwell Road, Manchester M17 3CYX, ENGLAND. ear Moungo, This letter is perhaps sooner than you expected, but a lot has happened in the past week that I ought to write to you about without delay. Given my primitive and reluctant memory, what could be better than writing now while the ideas are hot, the experiences real and the impressions fresh? I advise you to copy the above address into your address booklet, and conceal it in that same dark hole where Ghaddafi’s Green Book is hidden, before reading on. Knowing how easily excitable Monique is, and how mischievous your daughter Jackie has always been, anything can happen to this letter; but because I hate to feel imprisoned, lonely or abandoned this imminent winter, I implore you to accord presidential protection to my address. People have been estranged for life because of their carelessness with addresses. As you jolly well know, this is going to be my first winter ever. Already I hate to think of it, because of the awful stories I’ve heard. Everyone I’ve met so far seems very concerned, the elderly most especially, who are said to be usually the worst affected. My landlady spent an hour yesterday drilling me D 70 on how to survive the winter, which she believes might be worse than last year’s, which was the worst in 18 years. (The English adore superlatives, especially in praise of themselves!) I look forward to seeing the snow for the first time. The sun has not shone since I arrived in this Queendom, but the English say this is the best summer they’ve had in decades. Everywhere I’m greeted with fog thicker than the cloud of gunpowder at the funeral of a warrior, but this doesn’t seem to bother the drivers who race about in fast cars without accidents. My days have been dull, wet and freezing; but here the English are lying in their parks or roaming the streets in shorts and open-chested shirtsleeves, airy mini-skirts and perforated blouses of silk or light cotton. Bandaged-up in thick wool and padded boots and gloves, I look like an American footballer from Mercury! “What a wrong time to come here,” I thought initially, until Thomson and Thomson (my two English friends) laughed and said: “There is no right time to visit England.” I feel insulted by the weather, which I can’t but compare to a housewife out of favour with her brutish husband: she is either sulking, weeping, nagging or all three at once. But seldom happy! What an ill-omen in this country of the white man, for a thirsty philosopher of 35 from the Sleeping Continent! 71 Talking about the colour white, I wonder whether whiteness is romantic any more. Snowy Darwinian Purity has ceased to be a value of import. Imagine that TV presenters are threatened with the sack if they stay white! No product, I’ve learnt, would sell unless advertised by a white woman darkened by the sun or electricity. Judging from what I’ve heard on TV and read from the papers, everyone is fascinated by the sun; in fact, so fascinated that the most popular paper in this Queendom is named after the sun! They all want to take a holiday to Greece, Spain and the Caribbean to bathe themselves in the sun and be tanned by it. Millions of English holidaymakers flood to various resorts, defying the myth or reality which links the sun with skin cancer, and telling terrorists and striking air-traffic controllers to go to hell, so that they might have their share of the sun unperturbed. Two days ago I sat in the bus within earshot of a pretty young English woman with a face roasted in patches and a neck shedding its skin like a snake, and happened to overhear her proudly asking her friend to guess what had happened to her face. The friend’s guess was inaccurate, so she was told about the scourge of the sun in Rhodes. This friend, though equally pretty, was less fortunate this summer, but she hopes to make it next year; 72 and has taken up a part-time job in her local pub in order to save towards her prospective holiday. Both girls however, seemed disappointed with the fact that the tan they work so...