Memoirs of a Failed Diplomat by Dan Vittorio Segre

Author:Dan Vittorio Segre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Halban
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Forty years ago, none of these pessimistic considerations troubled my mind, which was totally occupied by the possibly irrelevant, but to me important, problem of getting back to Nairobi before the start of the Sabbath.

Sitting on the hotel veranda, where I was already mentally preparing myself to spend a sad Sabbath day if I were to miss the train connection, I shared my preoccupations with the hotel manager’s husband, the owner of the not very attractive hotel. He appeared tired and confused which made him seem older than his probable real age. Dressed in a pair of light-coloured, creased trousers, a foulard scarf inside the open collar of a shirt which must once have been white and starched, he sat in an armchair covered with a coloured cotton cloth, sunk in what seemed to me to be total absorption in the passing of time.

We chatted about nothing in particular, with long silences accompanied by drinks of ginger ale which an almost naked, young, black servant kept bringing us from an invisible kitchen which I preferred not to enter. My conversational partner, as if pursuing an idée fixe kept returning to the theme of the future of Kenya. Exactly like the Indian who had given me a lift from Kampala, the future of the country seemed to him full of danger. The present, already ruinous state of the roads would worsen; the status of Asian merchants would increase together with the arro­gance of the blacks. For the Europeans there was no hope, no security and no economic improvement in sight.

The sentences dribbled out of his mouth together with saliva and liquid traces of the drink which he was unable to swallow completely. He kept repeating his political mantra in a low flow of words which lost themselves in the warm air of the veranda, from which it was possible to see the silvery water of Lake Victoria.

This man, though still living, seemed to resemble the dead, black tree which I could see through the window, standing on the shore of the lake, surrounded by burgeoning vegetation. Even more than his wife who at least seemed to have something to do, he epitomised the world of European expatriates in Africa, de­prived of roots, identity, and motherland, in fact of everything but a passport, which he might well have to give up if he wanted to remain in the colony after independence.

I noticed, however, in this man’s being, something which I could not explain, and which made him in some way different from other poor whites. It was a kind of ancient melancholy or tiredness which, after we had exchanged information on our respective places of origin, I put down to the fact that he and his wife were born in Poland, where communism precluded any idea of return.

Meanwhile time was passing. The sky turned red, the sun sank on the invisible, far away, western shore of the lake. Birds sang more loudly than before, while the monkeys, on the contrary, seemed to

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