It looked less like the opening of a school than the announcement of the end of an old regime. A troop of young soldiers dressed in dark blue uniforms stood in the middle, holding their brass instruments, brutally sweating. There was no shade out there and they’d been in position for an hour already. I was sitting a hundred yards from them, under the canopy, with the great and good of the whole upper-river region, some local and international press, Granger and Judy, but not the President, and not Aimee, not yet. Fern was to bring her over, when everything was set and all were in place: a long process. Lamin and Hawa, who were neither great nor good, had been relegated to some far-off spot, distant from us, for the hierarchy of the seating was absolute. Every fifteen minutes or so Judy, or sometimes Granger, or sometimes me, would suggest that someone should really get those poor musical soldiers some water, but none of us did, and no one else did either. Meanwhile the nursery schools trooped in, each school in its distinctive uniform, pinafores, shirts and shorts in striking combinations of colors—orange and gray, or purple and yellow—led by small groups of women, their teachers, who had pulled out all the stops in terms of glamour. The teachers of Kunkujang Keitaya Nursery School wore tight red T-shirts and black jeans with rhinestone pockets and their hair in elaborate braids. The teachers of Tujereng Nursery School wore wrappers and headscarves of matching red-and-orange design and identical white platform sandals. Each team took a different approach from the next but like the Supremes maintained a perfect uniformity within their group. They entered through the main gate, sashayed across the yard, trailing children, poker-faced—as if they didn’t hear us all cheering—and when they reached their assigned spot two of the women would then unsmilingly unfurl a homemade banner with the name of the school upon it and stand holding it, shifting their weight from hip to hip as the wait continued. I don’t think I ever saw so many outrageously beautiful women in one place. I’d been dressed up too—Hawa told me firmly that my usual khakis and crumpled linen would not do—borrowing a white-and-yellow wrapper and top from my host, which, being far too narrow for me, I could not close at the back and so had to disguise the open seam with a wide red scarf casually thrown over my shoulders, although it was at least 102 degrees.
Finally, almost two hours after we’d sat down, all who were to be in the yard were in the yard, and Aimee, surrounded by a jostling crowd of well-wishers, was led by Fern to her central seat. Camera bulbs flared. And the first thing she turned to ask me was: “Where’s Lamin?” I didn’t have a chance to tell her: horns blew, the main event was upon us, and sitting back in my chair, I wondered if I might in fact have misunderstood everything I’d been so sure I’d understood in the previous two weeks. For now a parade of children walked into the square in costume, all of about seven or eight years old, dressed as the leaders of African nations. They came in kente-cloth and dashikis and Nehru collars and safari suits, and each had their own entourage, made up of other children who’d been done up as security guards: dark suits and dark glasses, speaking into fake walkie-talkies. Many of the little leaders had little wives by their side, dangling little handbags, though Lady Liberia walked alone, and South Africa came with three wives, who linked arms with each other as they walked behind him. To look at the crowd you would think nothing funnier had been seen by anyone in their lives, and Aimee, who also found it hilarious, wiped tears from her eyes as she reached out to hug the President of Senegal or squeeze the cheek of the President of C?te d’Ivoire. The leaders paraded past the desperate, sweating soldiers, and then in front of our seats, where they waved and posed for pictures but would not smile or speak. Then the band stopped blaring welcome horns and began a very loud brass rendition of the national anthem. Our chairs vibrated. I turned and saw two massive vehicles rumbling into the yard over the sandy ground: the first an SUV like the one in which we’d traveled four months before, and the second a real police jeep, so heavily armored it looked like a tank. Maybe a hundred children and teenagers from the village ran alongside these vehicles, behind, sometimes in front, but always dangerously close to the wheels, cheering and whooping. In the first car, standing up through the sun-roof, was an eight-year-old version of the President himself, in his white grand boubou and white kufi cap, holding his cane. A real stab at verisimilitude had been attempted: he was as dark as the President and had the same frog face. Next to him stood an eight-year-old glamour-girl, of about my shade, in a wig and a slinky red dress, throwing handfuls of Monopoly money into the crowd. Clinging to the sides of the car were more of these little security guards, with little sunglasses and little guns, which they pointed at the children, some of whom opened their arms in delight to expose their little chests to the aim of their peers. Two adult versions of these security types, in the same outfit, but with no gun, or not as far as I could see, ran beside the car, filming all this on the latest video cameras. In the police jeep bringing up the rear the little policemen with their toy guns shared space with real policemen with real Kalashnikovs. Both the little and big policemen held their guns in the air, to the delight of the children, who ran behind and tried to clamber into the back of the jeep themselves, to get to where the power was. The adults I sat among seemed torn between smiling cheers—whenever the cameras swung round to catch them—and crying out in terror as the vehicles threatened every moment to collide with their running children. “Move on over,” I heard a real policeman shout, to a persistent boy at his right axel, who was pleading for sweets. “Or we’ll move on over you!”
At last, the vehicles parked, the miniature President alighted and walked to the podium and gave a short speech I couldn’t hear a word of due to the feedback from the speakers. No one else could hear it either but we all laughed and applauded once it was done. I had the thought that if the President himself had come the effect would not have been so very different. A show of power is a show of power. Then Aimee went up, said a few words, kissed the little man, took his cane off him and waved it in the air to great cheering. The school was declared open.
? ? ?
We did not move from this formal ceremony on to a separate party as much as the formal ceremony instantly dissolved and a party replaced it. All those who had not been invited to the ceremony now invaded the pitch, the neat colonial line-up of chairs broke apart, everyone took whatever seating they needed. The glamorous lady teachers ushered their classes to areas of shade and laid out their lunches, which emerged hot and sealed in big pots from those large tartan-checked shopping bags they also sell in Kilburn market, international symbol of the thrifty and far-traveled. In the northernmost corner of the grounds the promised sound system started up. Any child who could get away from an adult or had no adult in the first place was over there, dancing. It sounded Jamaican to me, a form of dancehall, and as I seemed to have lost everybody in the sudden transition, I wandered over and watched the dancing. There were two modes. The dominant dance was an ironic imitation of their mothers: bent at the knees, hunched backs, backside out, watching their own feet as they stomped the rhythm into the ground. But every now and then—especially if they spotted me watching them—the moves jumped to other times and places, more familiar to me, through hip-hop and ragga, through Atlanta and Kingston, and I saw jerking, popping, sliding, grinding. A smirking, handsome boy of no more than ten knew some especially obscene moves and would do them in little bursts so that the girls around him could be periodically scandalized, scream, run to hide behind a tree, before creeping back to watch him do some more. He had his eye on me. He kept pointing at me, shouting something over the music, I couldn’t quite make it out: “Dance? Too bad! Dance? Dance! Too bad!” I took a step closer, smiled and shook my head no, though he knew I was considering it. “Ah, there you are,” said Hawa, from behind me, linked her arm with mine and led me back to our party.
Under a tree Lamin, Granger, Judy, our teachers and some of the children were gathered, all sucking from little saran-wrapped pyramids of either orange ice or ice-cold water. I took a water from the little girl selling them and Hawa showed me how to tear a corner with my teeth to suck the liquid out. When I finished I looked at the little twisted wrapper in my hand, like a deflated condom, and realized there was nowhere to put it but the ground, and that these pyramid drinks must be the source of all those plastic twists I saw piled up in every street, in the branches of trees, littering compounds, in every bush like blossom. I put it in my pocket to delay the inevitable and went to take a seat between Granger and Judy, who were in the middle of an argument.
“I didn’t say that,” Judy hissed. “What I said was: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’” She paused to take a loud suck of her ice pop. “And I bloody haven’t!”
“Yeah, well, maybe they’ve never seen some of the crazy shit we do. St. Patrick’s Day. I mean, what the fuck is St. Patrick’s Day?”
“Granger, I’m an Aussie—and basically a Buddhist. You can’t pin St. Patrick’s Day on me.”
“My point is: we love our President—”
“Ha! Speak for yourself!”
“—why shouldn’t these people respect and love their own damn leaders? What business is it of yours? You can’t just walk up in here with no context and judge—”