Blackman' Burden na-1 Read online

  The girl, finished with her main dish, sat back in her chair and looked at him from the side of her eyes, as though wondering whether or not he could take what she was about to say in the right way. She said, slowly, “You know, with possibly a few exceptions, you can’t enslave a man if he doesn’t want to be a slave. For instance, the white man was never able to enslave the Amerind; he died before he would become a slave. The majority of Jefferson’s slaves wanted to be slaves. If there were those among them that had the ability to revolt against slave psychology, a Jefferson would quickly promote such. A valuable human being will be treated in a manner proportionate to his value. A wise, competent, trustworthy slave became the majordomo of the master’s estate—with privileges and authority actually greater than that of free employees of the master.”

  Crawford thought about that for a moment. “I’ll accept that,” he said. “What’s the point you’re trying to make?”

  “I, too, was set a-thinking by some of the things said at the meeting, Homer. In particular, what Dr. Smythe had to say. Homer, are we sure these people want the things we are trying to give them?”

  He looked at her uncomfortably. “No they don’t,” he said bluntly. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here, either your AFAA or my African Development Project. We utilize persuasion, skullduggery, and even force to subvert their institutions, to destroy their present culture. Yes. I’ve known this a long time.”

  “Then how do you justify your being here?”

  He grinned sourly. “Let’s put it this way. Take the new government in Egypt. They send the army into some of the small back-country towns with bayoneted rifles, and orders to use them if necessary. The villagers are forced to poison their ancient village wells—one of the highest of imaginable crimes in such a country, imposed on them ruthlessly. Then they are forced to dig new ones in new places that are not intimately entangled with their own sewage drainage. Naturally they hate the government. In other towns, the army has gone in and, at gun point, forced the parents to give up their children, taken the children away in trucks and ‘imprisoned’ them in schools. Look, back in the States we have trouble with the Amish, who don’t want their children to be taught modern ways. What sort of reaction do you think the tradition-ritual-taboo-tribesmen of the six thousand year old Egyptian culture have to having modern education imposed on their children?”

  Isobel was frowning at him.

  Crawford wound it up. “That’s the position we’re in. That’s what we’re doing. Giving them things they need, in spite of the fact they don’t want them.”

  “But why?”

  He said, “You know the answer to that as well as I do. It’s like giving medical care to Typhoid Mary, in spite of the fact that she didn’t want it and didn’t believe such things as typhoid microbes existed. We had to protect the community against her. In the world today, such backward areas as Africa are potential volcanoes. We’ve got to deal with them before they erupt.”

  The waiter came with the bill and Homer took it.

  Isobel said, “Let’s go Dutch on that.”

  He grinned at her. “Consider it a donation to the AFAA.”

  Out on the street again, they walked slowly in the direction of the old administration buildings where both had left their means of transportation.

  Isobel, who was frowning thoughtfully, evidently over the things that had been said, said, “Let’s go this way. I’d like to see the old Great Mosque, in the Dyingerey Ber section of town. It’s always fascinated me.”

  Crawford said, looking at her and appreciating her attractiveness, all over again, “You know Timbuktu quite well, don’t you?”

  “I’ve just finished a job down in Kabara, and it’s only a few miles away.”

  “Just what sort of thing do you do?”

  She shrugged and made a moue. “Our little team concentrates on breaking down the traditional position of women in these cultures. To get them to drop the veil, go to school. That sort of thing. It’s a long story and …”

  Homer Crawford suddenly and violently pushed her to the side and to the ground and at the same time dropped himself and rolled frantically to the shelter of an adobe wall which had once been part of a house but now was little more than waist high.

  “Down!” he yelled at her.

  She bug-eyed him as though he had gone suddenly mad.

  There was a heavy, snub-nosed gun suddenly in his hand. He squirmed forward on elbows and belly until he reached the corner.

  “What’s the matter?” she blurted.

  He said grimly, “See those three holes in the wall above you?”

  She looked up, startled.

  “They weren’t there a moment ago.”

  What he was saying, dawned upon her. “But… but I heard no shots.”

  He cautiously peered around the wall, and was rewarded with a puff of sand inches from his face. He pulled his head back and his lips thinned over his teeth. He said to her, “Efficiently silenced guns have been around for quite a spell. Whoever that is is up there in the mosque. Listen, beat your way around by the back streets and see if you can find the members of my team, especially Abe Baker or Bey-ag-Akhamouk. Tell them what happened and that I think I’ve got the guy pinned down. That mosque is too much out in the open for him to get away without my seeing him.”

  “But… but who in the world would want to shoot you, Homer?”

  “Search me,” he growled. “My team has never operated in this immediate area.”

  “But then, it must be someone who was at the meeting.”

  VI

  “That it was,” Homer said grimly. “Now, go see if you can find my lads, will you? This joker is going to fall right into our laps. It’s going to be interesting to find out who hates the idea of African development so much that they’re willing to commit assassination.”

  But it didn’t work out that way.

  Isobel found the other teammates one by one, and they came hurrying up from different directions to the support of their chief. They had been a team for years and operating as they did and where they did, each man survived only by selfless cooperation with all the others. In action, they operated like a single unit, their ability to cooperate almost as though they had telepathic communication.

  From where he lay, Homer Crawford could see Bey-ag-Akhamouk, Tommy-Noiseless in hands, snake in from the left, running low and reaching a vantage point from which he could cover one flank of the ancient adobe mosque. Homer waved to him and Bey made motions to indicate that one of the others was coming in from the other side.

  Homer waited for a few more minutes, then waved to Bey to cover him. The streets were empty at this time of midday when the Sahara sun drove the town’s occupants into the coolness of dark two-foot-thick walled houses. It was as though they were operating in a ghost town. Homer came to his feet and hand gun in fist made a dash for the front entrance.

  Bey’s light automatic flic flic flicked its excitement, and dust and dirt enveloped the wall facing Crawford. Homer reached the doorway and stood there for a full two minutes while he caught his breath. From the side of his eye he could see Elmer Allen, his excellent teeth bared as always when the Jamaican went into action, come running up to the right in that half-crouch men automatically go into in combat, instinctively presenting as small a target as possible. He was evidently heading for a side door or window.

  The object now was to refrain from killing the sniper. The important thing was to be able to question him. Perhaps here was the answer to the massacre of the Cubans. Homer took another deep breath, smashed the door open with a heavy shoulder and dashed inward and immediately to one side. At the same moment, Abe Baker, Tommy-Noiseless in hand, came in from the rear door, his eyes darting around trying to pierce the gloom of the unlighted building.

  Elmer Allen erupted through a window, rolled over on the floor and came to rest, his gun trained.

  “Where is he?” Abe snapped.

  Homer motioned with his head. “Must be u
p in the remains of the minaret.”

  Abe got to the creaking, age-old stairway first. In cleaning out a hostile building, the idea is to move fast and keep on the move. Stop, and you present a target.

  But there was no one in the minaret.

  “Got away,” Homer growled. His face was puzzled. “I felt sure we’d have him.”

  Bey-ag-Akhamouk entered. He grunted his disappointment. “What happened, anyway? That girl Isobel said a sniper took some shots at you and you figure it must’ve been somebody at the meeting.”

  “Somebody at the meeting?” Abe said blankly. “What kind of jazz is that? You flipping, man?”

  Homer looked at him strangely.

  “Who else could it be, Abe? We’ve never operated this far south. None of the inhabitants in this area even know us, and it certainly couldn’t have been an attempt at robbery.”

  “There were some cats at that meeting didn’t appreciate our ideas, man, but I can’t see that old preacher or Doc Smythe trying to put the slug on you.”

  Kenny Ballalou came in on the double, gun in hand, his face anxious.

  Abe said sarcastically, “Man, we’d all be dead if we had to wait on you.”

  “That girl Isobel. She said somebody took a shot at the chief.”

  Homer explained it, sourly. A sniper had taken a few shots at him, then managed to get away.

  Isobel entered, breathless, followed by Jake Armstrong.

  Abe grunted, “Let’s hold another convention. This is like old home town week.”

  Her eyes went from one of them to the other. “You’re not hurt?”

  “Nobody hurt, but the cat did all the shooting got away,” Abe said unhappily.

  Jake said, and his voice was worried, “Isobel told me what happened. It sounds insane.”

  They discussed it for a while and got exactly nowhere. Their conversation was interrupted by a clicking at Homer Crawford’s wrist. He looked down at the tiny portable radio.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” he said to the others and went off a dozen steps or so to the side.

  They looked after him.

  Elmer Allen said sourly, “Another assignment. What we need is a union.”

  Abe adopted the idea. “Man! Time and a half for overtime.”

  “With a special cost of living clause,” Kenny Ballalou added.

  “And housing and dependents allotment!” Abe crowed.

  They all looked at him.

  Bey tried to imitate the other’s beatnik patter. “Like, you got any dependents, man?”

  Abe made a mark in the sand on the mosque’s floor with the toe of his shoe, like a schoolboy up before the principal for an infraction of rules, and registered embarrassment. “Well, there’s that cute little Tuareg girl up north.”

  “Ha!” Isobel said. “And all these years you’ve been leading me on.”

  Homer Crawford returned and his face was serious. “That does it,” he muttered disgustedly. “The fat’s in the fire.”

  “Like, what’s up, man?”

  Crawford looked at his right-hand man. “There are demonstrations in Mopti. Riots.”

  “Mopti?” Jake Armstrong said, surprised. “Our team was working there just a couple of months ago. I thought everything was going fine in Mopti.”

  “They’re going fine, all right,” Crawford growled. “So well that the local populace wants to speed up even faster.”

  They were all looking their puzzlement at him.

  “The demonstrations are in favor of El Hassan.”

  Their faces turned blank.

  Crawford’s eyes swept his teammates. “Our instructions are to get down there and do what we can to restore order. Come on, let’s go. I’m going to have to see if I can arrange some transportation. It’d take us two days to get there in our outfits.”

  Jake Armstrong said, “Wait a minute, Homer. My team was heading back for Dakar for a rest and new assignments. We’d be passing Mopti anyway. How many of you are there, five? If you don’t haul too much luggage with you, we could give you a lift.”

  “Great,” Homer told him. “We’ll take you up on that. Abe, Elmer, let’s get going. We’ll have to repack. Bey, Kenny, see about finding some place we can leave the lorries until we come back. This job shouldn’t take more than a few days at most.”

  “Huh,” Abe said. “I hope you got plans, man. How do you go about stopping demonstrations in favor of a legend you created yourself?”

  Mopti, also on the Niger, lies approximately three hundred kilometers to the south and slightly west of Timbuktu, as the bird flies. However, one does not travel as the bird flies in the Niger bend, not even when one goes by aircraft. A forced landing in the endless swamps, bogs, shallow lakes and river tributaries which make up the Niger at this point would be suicidal. The whole area is more like the Florida Everglades than a river, and a rescue team would be hard put to find your wreckage. There are no roads, no railroads. Traffic follows the well-marked navigational route of the main channel.

  Homer Crawford had been sitting quietly next to Cliff Jackson who was piloting. Isobel and Jake Armstrong were immediately behind them and Abe and the rest of Crawford’s team took up the remainder of the aircraft’s eight seats. Abe was regaling the others with his customary chaff.

  Out of a clear sky, Crawford said bitterly, “Has it occurred to any of you that what we’re doing here in North Africa is committing genocide?”

  The others stared at him, taken aback. Isobel said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “Genocide,” Crawford said bitterly. “We’re doing here much what the white men did when they cleared the Amerinds from the plains, the mountains and forests of North America.”

  Isobel, Cliff and Jake frowned their puzzlement. Abe said, “Man, you just don’t make sense. And, among other things, there’re more Indians in the United States than there was when Columbus landed.”

  Crawford shook his head. “No. They’re a different people. Those cultures that inhabited the United States when the first white men came are gone.” He shook his head as though soured by his thoughts. “Take the Sioux. They had a way of life based on the buffalo. So the whites deliberately exterminated the buffalo. It made the plains Indians’ culture impossible. A culture based on buffalo herds cannot exist if there are no buffalo.”

  “I keep telling you, man, there’s more Sioux now than there were then.”

  Crawford still shook his head. “But they’re a different people, a different race, a different culture. A mere fraction, say ten percent, of the original Sioux might have adapted to the new life. The others beat their heads out against the new ways. They fought—the Sitting Bull wars took place after the buffalo were already gone—they drank themselves to death on the white man’s firewater, they committed suicide; in a dozen different ways they called it quits. Those that survived, the ten percent, were the exceptions. They were able to adapt. They had a built-in genetically conferred self-discipline enough to face the new problems. Possibly eighty percent of their children couldn’t face the new problems either and they in turn went under. But by now, a hundred years later, the majority of the Sioux nation have probably adapted. But, you see, the point I’m trying to make? They’re not the real Sioux, the original Sioux; they’re a new breed. The plains-living, buffalo-based culture Sioux are all dead. The white men killed them.”

  Jake Armstrong was scowling. “I get your point, but what has it to do with our work here in North Africa?”

  “We’re doing the same thing to the Tuareg, the Teda and the Chaambra, and most of the others in the area in which we operate. The type of human psychology that’s based on the nomad life can’t endure settled community living. Wipe out the nomad way of life and these human beings must die.”

  Abe said, unusually thoughtful, “I see what you mean, man. Fish gotta swim, bird gotta fly— and nomad gotta roam. He flips if he doesn’t.”

  Homer Crawford pursued it. “Sure, there’ll be Tuareg afterward… but all descended from the f
raction of deviant Tuareg who were so abnormal—speaking from the Tuareg viewpoint—that they liked settled community life.” He rubbed a hand along his jawbone. “Put it this way. Think of them as a tribe of genetic claustrophobes. No matter what a claustrophobe promises, he can’t work in a mine. He has no choice but to break his promise and escape … or kill himself trying.”

  Isobel was staring at him. “What you say is disturbing, Homer. I didn’t come to Africa to destroy a people.” He looked back at her, oddly. “None of us did.” Cliff said from behind the aircraft’s controls, “If you believe what you’re saying, how do you justify being here yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” Crawford said unhappily. “I don’t know what started me on this kick, but I seem to have been doing more inner searching this past week or so than I have in the past couple of decades. And I don’t seem to come up with much in the way of answers.”

  “Well, man,” Abe said. “If you find any, let us know.” Jake said, his voice warm, “Look Homer, don’t beat yourself about this. What you say figures, but you’ve got to take it from this angle. The plains Indians had to go. The world is developing too fast for a few thousand people to tie up millions of acres of some of the most fertile farm land anywhere, because they needed it for their game—the buffalo—to run on.”

  “Um-m-m,” Homer said, his voice lacking conviction.

  “Maybe it’s unfortunate the way it was done. The story of the American’s dealing with the Amerind isn’t a pretty one, and usually comfortably ignored when we pat ourselves on the back these days and tell ourselves what a noble, honest, generous and peace-loving people we are. But it did have to be done, and the job we’re doing in North Africa has to be done, too.”

  Crawford said softly, “And sometimes it isn’t very pretty either.”

  Mopti as a town had grown Once a small riverport city of about five thousand population, it had been a river and caravan crossroads somewhat similar to Timbuktu, and noted in particular for its spice market and its Great Mosque, probably the largest building of worship ever made of mud. Plastered newly at least twice a year with fresh adobe, at a distance of only a few hundred feet the Great Mosque, in the middle of the day and in the glare of the Sudanese sun, looks as though it were made of gold. From the air it is more attractive than the grandest Gothic cathedrals of Europe.