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that’s the situation we have to deal with.”
    He turns into an alley. The only illumination comes from the car’s headlights. He counts off the shacks as we trundle past. They are not numbered. He stops and cuts the engine and lights.
    “Can you imagine what’s going to happen when the settlers find out?” he says as we get out of the car. “Most of them right now are burying their heads in the sand. They won’t admit even to themselves what’s going on. The men are out there on the links boasting about their cars and their pensions and the women sit in each other’s houses talking about curtains and kitchens. They think their colony is going on forever, that they’re going to live like lords and ladies for the rest of their lives. But real soon they’re going to have to make some very big mental and material adjustments. It’s going to be difficult for them.”
    My thoughts turn to Madeleine. I can see that the required adjustments might not be easy for her.
    Stipe leads me to the anonymous door of a dingy shack. He doesn’t have to knock, our arrival has been noted. A black man of medium height appears to greet us. He wears sharply pressedma roon trousers and a bright, violently patterned yellow and green shirt which has the sheen of synthetic silk. The ridiculously huge buckles on his patent shoes gleam in the half light. He has a heavy fake-gold necklace and several rings set with red and amber glass.
    Stipe puts an arm around the man’s shoulders.
    “James, this is my driver, Auguste,” he says in French.
    Auguste is handsome, with a high-domed forehead, good cheekbones and a strong jaw, and he would have appeared intimidating, or at least serious, had he not smiled as we entered. The smile spoiled the face; his look then was almost comically craven.
    “This is a great kid,” Stipe says, looking at Auguste like a father at a son and shaking him with rough affection. “You didn’t get caught up in the shooting?”
    “I was there, but I’m okay,” Auguste replies.
    “You shouldn’t have gone.” Stipe’s voice is full of tender remonstration. “I told you there was going to be trouble.”
    Auguste closes the door behind us. The small, windowless room is bare except for an iron bedstead—no mattress—and a long plank of gray, splintering lumber, raised by mud bricks to about a foot from the floor to serve as a bench. An old hurricane lamp gives out what little light there is. On Auguste’s brusque command, two young men shift from the bench to the relative discomfort of the bedstead. The black paint on the iron frame is bubbled and flaking. The air is close with the smell of damp earth and sweat. A grubby kitten plays on the raffia mat laid over the dirt floor. Auguste and his two companions sit opposite us like bored children, watching in a distracted sort of way but saying nothing.
    Stipe asks for more details about the afternoon’s events. Auguste’s French is slow but the accent, cadences and phrasing are too unfamiliar for me to be able to follow easily. I do, however, pick up the mention of “Patrice.”
    “Is Patrice all right?” Stipe asks. His own French is heavily accented but fluent.
    Auguste nods to the far wall, where an old bedcover hangs over what looks like the entrance to an adjoining room, from where I can hear several voices. We settle down to wait.
    “Why would the Belgians want to give up their colony?” I ask Stipe after a while.
    “When you ask the Belgians why they’re in the Congo, they tell you,
dominer pour servir.
Dominate to serve. To serve and civilize. That, they say, is the sole excuse for colonialism, and its complete justification. It’s bullshit of course. The excuse is profit. Once the profits go, so do the excuses.”
    “Have the profits gone?”
    “Gone and goodbye. The colony’s economy is shot.”
    “It doesn’t look it.”
    “It’s a disaster zone,” he says flatly; then he adds: “If you wanted to write an article about this, I could