Blackman' Burden na-1 Page 6

  Abd-el-Kader hadn’t remained the victor of a score of similar duels through making such mistakes as underestimating his foe. In spite of the black stranger’s seeming ignorance of his weapon, the Arab had no intention of being sucked into a trap. He advanced with care.

  His sword darted forward, quickly, experimentally, and Homer Crawford barely caught its razor edge on his own.

  Save for his own four companions, the crowd laughed aloud. None among them were so clumsy as this.

  The Ouled Touameur chief was convinced. He stepped in fast, the blade flicked in and out in a quick feint, then flicked in again. Homer Crawford countered clumsily.

  And then there was a roar as the American’s blade left his hand and flew high in the air to come to the ground again a score of feet behind the desert swordsman.

  For a brief moment Abd-el-Kader stepped back to observe his foe, and there was mockery in his face. “So thy manhood has been spat upon by one who fights only with his mouth! Almost, braggart, I am inclined to give you your life so that you may spend the rest of it in shame. Now die, unbeliever!”

  Crawford stood hopelessly, in a semicrouch, his hands still slightly forward. The Arab came in fast, his sword at the ready for the death stroke.

  Suddenly, the American moved forward and then jumped a full yard into the air, feet forward and into the belly of the advancing Arab. The heavily shod right foot struck at the point in the abdomen immediately below the sternum, the solar plexus, and the left was as low as the groin. In a motion that was almost a bounce off the other’s body, Crawford came lithely back to his feet, jumped back two steps and crouched again.

  But Abd-el-Kader was through, his eyes popping agony, his body writhing on the ground. The whole thing, from the time the Arab had advanced on the disarmed man for the kill, hadn’t taken five seconds.

  His groans were the only sounds which broke the unbelieving silence of the Chaambra tribesmen. Homer Crawford picked up the fallen leader’s sword and then strolled over and retrieved that of El Aicha. Ignoring Abd-el-Kader, he crossed to where the tribal elders had assembled to watch the fight and held out the borrowed sword to its owner.

  El Aicha sheathed it while looking into Homer Crawford’s face. “It has still never been drawn to commit dishonor.”

  “My thanks,” Crawford said.

  Over the noise of the crowd which now was beginning to murmur its incredulity at their champion’s fantastic defeat came the voice of Abe Baker swearing in Arabic and yelling for a way to be cleared for him. He was driving one of the hovercraft.

  He drew it up next to the still agonized Abd-el-Kader and got out accompanied by Bey-ag-Akhamouk. Silently and without undue roughness they picked up the fallen clan chief and put him into the back of the hover-lorry, ignoring the crowd.

  Homer Crawford came up and said in English, “All right, let’s get out of here. Don’t hurry, but on the other hand don’t let’s prolong it. One of those Ouled Touameur might collect himself to the point of deciding he ought to rescue his leader.”

  Abe looked at him disgustedly. “Like, where’d you learn that little party trick, man?”

  Crawford yawned. “I said I didn’t know anything about swords. You didn’t ask me about judo. I once taught judo in the Marines.”

  “Well, why didn’t you take him sooner? He like to cut your head off with that cheese knife before you landed on him.”

  “I couldn’t do it sooner. Not until he knocked the sword out of my hand. Until then it was a sword fight. But as soon as I had no sword, then in the eyes of every Chaambra present I had the right to use any method possible to save myself.”

  Bey-ag-Akhamouk looked up at the sun to check the time. “We better speed it up if we want to get this man to Columb-Béchar and then get on down over the desert to Timbuktu and that meeting.”

  “Let’s go,” Homer said. The second hovecraft joined them, driven by Elmer Allen, and they made their way through the staring, but motionless, crowds of Chaambra.

  IV

  Once the city of Timbuktu was more important in population, in commerce, and in learning than the London, the Paris or the Rome of the time. It was the crossroads where African traffic, east and west, met African traffic, north and south; Timbuktu dominated all. In its commercial houses accumulated the wealth of Africa; in its universities and mosques the wisdom of Greece, Rome, Byzantium and the Near East—at a time when such learning was being destroyed in the Dark Ages of Europe.

  Timbuktu’s day lasted but two or three hundred years at most. By the middle of the twentieth century it had deteriorated into what looked like nothing so much as a New Mexico ghost town, built largely of adobe. Its palaces and markets had melted away to caricatures of their former selves, its universities were a memory of yesteryear, its population fallen off to a few thousands. Not until the Niger Projects, the dams and irrigation projects, of the latter part of the twentieth century did the city begin to regain a semblance of its old importance.

  Homer Crawford’s team had come down over the Tanezrouft route, Reggan, Bidon Cinq and Tessalit; that of Isobel Cunningham, Jacob Armstrong and Clifford Jackson, up from Timbuktu’s Niger River port of Kabara. They met in the former great market square, bordered on two sides by the one time French Administration buildings.

  Isobel reacted first. “Abe!” she yelled, pointing accusingly at him.

  Abe Baker pretended to cringe, then reacted. “Isobel! Somebody told me you were over here!”

  She ran over the heavy sand, which drifted through the streets, to the hovercraft in which he had just pulled up. He popped out to meet her, grinning widely.

  “Why didn’t you look me up?” she said accusingly, presenting a cheek to be kissed.

  “In Africa, man?” he laughed. “Kinda big, Africa. Like, I didn’t know if you were in the Sahara, or maybe down in Angola, or wherever.”

  She frowned. “Heaven forbid.”

  Abe turned to the others of his team who had crowded up behind him. It had been a long time since any of them had seen other than native women.

  “Isobel,” he said, “I hate to do this, but let me introduce you to Homer Crawford, my immediate boss and slave driver, late of the University of Michigan where he must’ve found out where the body was—they gave him a doctorate. Then here’s Elmer Allen, late of Jamaica—British West Indies, not Long Island—all he’s got is a master’s, also in sociology. And this is Kenneth Ballalou, hails from San Francisco, I don’t think Kenny ever went to school, but he seems to speak every language ever.” Abe turned to his final companion. “And this is our sole real African, Bey-ag-Akhamouk, of Tuareg blood, so beware, they don’t call the Tuareg the Apaches of the Sahara for nothing.”

  Bey pretended to wince as he held out his hand. “Since Abe seems to be an education snob, I might as well mention the University of Minnesota and my Political Science.”

  Jake Armstrong and Cliff Jackson had come up behind Isobel, and were now introduced in turn. The older man said, “A Tuareg in a Reunited Nations team? Not that it makes any difference to me, but I thought there was some sort of policy.”

  “I was taken to the States when I was three,” Bey said. “I’m an American citizen.”

  Isobel was chattering, in animation, with Abe Baker. It developed they’d both been reporters on the school paper at Columbia. At least, they’d both started as reporters; Isobel had wound up editor.

  Since their introduction, Homer Crawford had been vaguely frowning at her. Now he said, “I’ve been trying to place where I’d seen you before. Now I know. Some photographs of Lena Horne, she was…”

  Isobel dropped a mock curtsy. “Thank you, kind sir, you don’t have to tell me about Lena Horne, she’s a favorite. I have scads of tapes of her.”

  “Brother,” Elmer Allen said dourly, “how’s anybody going to top that? Homer’s got the inside track now. Let’s get over to this meeting. By the cars, helio-copters and hovercraft around here, you got more of a turnout than I expected, Homer.”
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  The meeting was held in what had once been an assembly chamber of the officials of the former Cercle de Tombouctou, when this had all been part of French Sudan. It was the only room in the vicinity which would comfortably hold all of them.

  Elmer Allen had been right; there was something like a hundred persons present, almost all men but with a sprinkling of women, such as Isobel. More than half were in native costume running the gamut from Nigeria to Morocco and from Mauritania to Ethiopia. They were a competent-looking, confident-voiced gathering.

  Homer Crawford knocked with a knuckle on the table that stood at the head of the hall and called for silence. “Sorry we’re late,” he said, “particularly in view of the fact that the idea of this meeting originated with my team. We had some difficulty with a nomad raider, up in Chaambra country.”

  Someone from halfway back in the hall said bitterly, “I suppose in typical African Development Project style, you killed the poor man.”

  Crawford said dryly, “Poor man isn’t too accurate a description of the gentleman involved. However, he is at present in jail awaiting trial.” He got back to the meeting. “I had originally thought of this being an informal get-together of a score or so of us, but in view of the numbers I suggest we appoint a temporary chairman.”

  “You’re doing all right,” Jake Armstrong said from the second row of chairs.

  “I second that,” an unknown called from farther back.

  Crawford shrugged. His manner had a cool competence. “All right. If there is no objection, I’ll carry on until the meeting decides, if it ever does, that there is need of elected officers.”

  “I object.” In the third row a white haired but Prussian-erect man had come to his feet. “I wish to know the meaning of this meeting. I object to it being held at all.”

  Abe Baker called to him, “Dad, how can you object to it being held if you don’t know what it’s for?”

  Homer Crawford said, “Suppose I briefly sum up our mutual situation and if there are any motions to be made —including calling the meeting quits—or decisions to come to, we can start from there.”

  There was a murmur of assent. The objector sat down in a huff.

  Crawford looked out over them. “I don’t know most of you. The word of this meeting must have spread from one group or team to another. So what I’ll do is start from the beginning, saying little at first with which you aren’t already familiar, but we’ll lay a foundation.”

  He went on. “This situation which we find in Africa is only a part of a world-wide condition. Perhaps to some, particularly in the Western World as they call it, Africa isn’t of primary importance. But, needless to say, it is to us here in the field. Not too many years ago, at the same period the African colonies were bursting their bonds and achieving independence, an international situation was developing that threatened future peace. The rich nations were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer, and the rate of this change was accelerating. The reasons were various. The population growth in the backward countries, unhampered by birth control and rocketing upward due to new sanitation, new health measures, and the conquest of a score of diseases that have bedeviled man down through the centuries, was fantastic. Try as they would to increase per capita income in the have-not nations, population grew faster than new industry and new agricultural methods could keep up. On top of that handicap was another; the have-not nations were so far behind economically that they couldn’t get going. Why build a bicycle factory in Morocco which might be able to turn out bikes for, say, fifty dollars apiece, when you could buy them from automated factories in Europe, Japan or the United States for twenty-five dollars?”

  Most of his audience were nodding agreement, some of them impatiently, as though wanting him to get on with it.

  Crawford continued. “For a time aid to these backward nations was left in the hands of the individual nations—especially to the United States and Russia. However, in spite of speeches of politicians to the contrary, governments are not motivated by humanitarian purposes. The government of a country does what it does for the benefit of the ruling class of that country. That was the reason it was appointed the government. Any government that doesn’t live up to this dictum soon stops being the government.”

  “That isn’t always so,” somebody called.

  Homer Crawford grinned. “Bear with me a while,” he said. “We can debate till the Niger freezes over later on.”

  He went on. “For instance, the United States would aid Country X with a billion dollars at, say, four percent interest, stipulating that the money be spent in America. This is aid? It certainly is for American business. But then our friends the Russians come along and loan the same country a billion rubles at a very low interest rate and with supposedly no strings attached, to build, say, a railroad. Very fine indeed, but first of all the railroad, built Russian style and with Russian equipment, soon needs replacements, new locomotives, more rolling stock. Where must it come from? Russia, of course. Besides that, in order to build and run the railroad it became necessary to send Russian technicians to Country X and also to send students from Country X to Moscow to study Russian technology so that they could operate the railroad.” Crawford’s voice went wry. “Few countries, other than commie ones, much desire to have their students study in Moscow.”

  There was a slight stirring in his audience and Homer Crawford grinned slightly. “You’ll pardon me if in this little summation, I step on a few ideological toes—of both East and West.

  “Needless to say, under these conditions of aid, the economies of various countries fell under the domination of the two great collossi in short order. At the same time the other have nations including Great Britain, France, Germany and the newly awakening China, began to realize that unless they got into the aid act that they would disappear as competitors for the tremendous markets in the newly freed former colonial lands. Also along in here it became obvious that philanthropy with a mercenary basis doesn’t always work out to the benefit of the receiver and the world began to take measures to administer aid more efficiently and through world bodies rather than national ones.

  “But there was still another problem, particularly here in Africa. The newly freed former colonies were wary of the nations that had formerly owned them and often for good reason, always remembering that governments are not motivated by humanitarian reasons. England did not free India because her heart bled for the Indian people, nor did France finally free Algeria because the French conscience was stirred with thoughts of freedom, equality and fraternity.”

  A voice broke in from halfway down the hall, a voice heavy with British accent. “I say, why did you Yanks free the Philippines?”

  Homer Crawford laughed, as did several other Americans present. “That’s the first time I’ve ever been called a Yankee,” he said. “But the point is well taken. By freeing the islands we washed our hands of the responsibility of such expensive matters as their health and education, and at the same time we granted freedom we made military and economic treaties which perpetuated our fundamental control of the Philippines.

  “The point is made. The distrust of the European and the white man as a whole was prevalent, especially here in Africa. However, and particularly in Africa, the citizens of the new countries were almost unbelievably uneducated, untrained, incapable of engineering their own destiny. In whole nations there was not a single lawyer or…

  “That’s no handicap,” somebody called.

  There was laughter through the hall.

  Homer Crawford laughed, too, and nodded as though in solemn agreement. “However, there were also no doctors, engineers, scientists. There were whole nations without a single college graduate.”

  He paused and his eyes swept the hall. “That’s where we came in. Most of us here this afternoon are from the States; however, also represented to my knowledge are British West Indians, a Canadian or two, at least one Panamanian, and possibly some Cubans. Down in the southern part of the continent I
know of teams working in the Portuguese areas who are Brazilian in background. All of us, of course, are Africans racially, but few if any of us know from what part of Africa their forebears came. My own grandfather was born a slave in Mississippi and didn’t know his father; my grandmother was already a hopeless mixture of a score of African tribes.

  “That, I assume, is the story of most if not all of us. Our ancestors were wrenched from the lands of their birth and shipped under conditions worse than cattle to the New World.” He added simply, “Now we return.”

  There was a murmur throughout his listeners, but no one interrupted.

  “When the great powers of Europe arbitrarily split up Africa in the nineteenth century they didn’t bother with race, tribe, nor even geoographic boundaries. Largely they seemed to draw their boundary lines with ruler and pencil on a Mercator projection. Often, not only were native nations split in twain but even tribes and clans, and sometimes split not only one way but two or three. It was chaotic to the old tribal system. Of course, when the white man left various efforts were made from the very start to join that which had been torn apart a century earlier. Right here in this area, Senegal and what was then French Sudan merged to form the shortlived Mali Federation. Ghana and French Guinea formed a shaky alliance. More successful was the federation of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and Zanzibar, which of course, has since grown.

  “But there were fantastic difficulties. Many of the old tribal institutions had been torn down, but new political institutions had been introduced only in a half-baked way. African politicians, supposedly ‘democratically’ elected, had no intention of facing the possibility of giving up their individual powers by uniting with their neighbors. Not only had the Africans been divided tribally, but now politically as well. But obviously, so long as they continued to be Balkanized the chances of rapid progress were minimized.