Interview réalisée par Jacques TESTARD et Tristan SUMMERSCALE
Juin 2011
- THE WHITE REVIEW
— You grew up in Africa. What was that like?
- WILLIAM BOYD
— I am a child of the colonial system, and, as somebody said to me the
other day, I suppose I am the last of a generation. I was born in Accra in
1952. Ghana got its independence in 1957 when I was five and then we moved to
Nigeria, which got its independence in 1960, so we were really living out there
at the tail end of the colonial era, when the wind of change was blowing
through Africa.
My father was a doctor
and my mother was a teacher and they spent their working lives out on what was
then called the Gold Coast, where they moved in 1950. During the war, my father
had specialised in tropical medicine, so he went back to the tropics five years
later. It was supposed to be short-term but in fact he spent thirty years
there, until he became ill and died. I grew up in a nice house with lots of
African servants, nannies, gardeners, houseboys and cooks, and I often wonder
how totally different my life would have been if my father had stayed and
become a GP in Scotland.
It was an idyllic
childhood, going to the beach and the club and the pool and tennis and so on,
except in the late 1960s Nigeria began to implode. There were a series of
military coups followed by the Nigerian Civil War – the Biafran War – which
made a profound impression on me in my late teens. I was never in any danger but
living in a country that was tearing itself apart was pretty extraordinary.
The great thing about
the West African colonies as opposed to the eastern or the southern colonies
was that there was no white settler class, so there was no racism. Obviously, apartheid
existed in South Africa, but Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Kenya and Tanganyika had all
been settled by white people and the tension between white and black was always
there. Growing up in West Africa was, racially, a completely different
experience. It was totally integrated and I could go anywhere without fearing
anything whatsoever. I could walk around in the middle of the night in Ibadan,
a great sprawling Nigerian city of close to a million people, and people would
shout, ‘White boy!’ but you never felt threatened.
When I meet people who
grew up in South Africa or Kenya, I realise that their experience of an African
life was quite different because of this settler-indigenous schism. But in West
Africa it just wasn’t there. White people would come out, work for thirty
years, and then go away again. Nobody bought property, nobody had farms, nobody
owned anything. In Rhodesia, there was this extraordinary statistic: five
percent of the white population owned seventy percent of the arable land. In
West Africa, that time bomb didn’t exist.
When I look back on this
childhood now, I see it as something quite extraordinary but of course where
you live with your parents is quite normal. It was a very odd mix of the exotic
and the astonishing and sometimes the frightening and the terrifying – all of
these part of your everyday life.
Until the age of about
twenty-two, I regarded West Africa as my home. Even though I was at boarding
school and my relatives lived in Scotland, my home was in Western Nigeria, and
I felt more at home there than I did in London or Edinburgh.
- THE WHITE REVIEW
— Did you feel comfortable
when you were back in Scotland?
- WILLIAM BOYD
— Not really. I felt sort of an outsider, which became useful to me as a
writer. I spent nine and a half years at boarding school up in the north of
Scotland, at Gordonstoun. I knew that world fantastically well but I realised
quite early on it was totally artificial and bore no resemblance to the real
world. The single-sex boarding school is a very strange society, and in my day
you went there for a three-month stretch and it was a type of penal servitude.
I only saw the ‘real’
world on occasional holidays. I always felt as if I were on the outside looking
in. I didn’t feel particularly at home and it wasn’t until I went to university
and I started living in a flat in Glasgow that I could honestly say for the
first time that I was experiencing British life.
My father was a powerful
figure in his realm in Africa, where he ran half-a-dozen clinics and was
responsible for 40,000 people, but I always remember him trying to buy an
evening newspaper in Edinburgh. He didn’t know what the money was and the paper
man had to pick the coins out of his hands. Suddenly I realised that he was
adrift here as well.
- THE WHITE REVIEW
— Is this why this idea of the
outsider recurs in your writing?
- WILLIAM BOYD
— Partly, although A Good Man in Africa was actually the
fourth novel I’d written. I’d already written three unpublished novels. When I
was an undergraduate I wrote a novel which was incredibly autobiographical
about my year in France between school and university. I’d gone to do a diploma
at the University of Nice, which was a very formative year for me. Again, I was
away from my family, culture and language, and I wrote a novel about that year,
got it out of my system, and put it in a bottom drawer where it remains.
Then, I wrote a novel about
the Biafran War while at Oxford, where I was doing my DPhil. It was a very
self-consciously modernist novel with a fractured form, switching from diary
extracts, newspaper extracts, standard narrative and first person. I’d
shattered the linear conventions of the novel but it didn’t quite come off so I
wrote another novel – a thriller – because I was beginning to get a bit
desperate about getting published.
At the time, I was also
publishing short stories quite successfully – nine or ten appeared in magazines
and some were being broadcast on the radio. My short story writing career
seemed to be going well, so I sent a collection off to Hamish Hamilton and
Jonathan Cape. In a post-scriptum, I told them that I’d written a novel
featuring a character called Morgan Leafy, a fat drunken diplomat in Africa who
appeared in two of the stories.
Very quickly, I got a
letter back from Hamish Hamilton asking for more information about the novel I
had mentioned, so I wrote the synopsis of this novel in three or four pages and
sent it off. A letter came back saying they’d like to publish my short story
collection and my novel. That was the great ‘Yes!’ punch-the-air day, but they
wanted to publish the novel first, and, of course, I hadn’t written it, I had
lied.
So I said to my new
editor, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, ‘Look, the manuscript is in a shocking
state, I just need a couple of months to knock into shape’, and I sat down and
wrote A Good Man in Africa in a white heat of dynamic endeavour
in three months at my kitchen table. I was teaching at Oxford at the time so I
just dropped everything and borrowed some money from my mother. It was all
there waiting to come out and suddenly there it was.
Six months later, the
stories came out. I published two books in 1981, so it was a great start, but
it was by no means an overnight success. I was able to write A Good Man
in Africa because I’d already written three novels. It’s not the
classic first novel because I’d already written that four or five years
earlier. I’d gotten the fascination with my own life out of my system.
- THE WHITE REVIEW
— Are there no
autobiographical elements there? What about Dr Alex Murray, the good man in Africa?
Is he not based on your father?
- WILLIAM BOYD
— It is very much the world I knew. It is completely set in Ibadan in
Western Nigeria even though I changed the names, but everybody in it is made
up. It’s rooted in my autobiography in terms of its colour, texture and smells
but the story is – and that’s something that’s always been the case with me –
invented.
There is an
autobiographical element in that the character of Dr Murray is very much a
two-dimensional portrait of my father. He had died the year before I wrote the
novel so he was very much present in my mind. The clash in the novel is between
a dissolute, overweight diplomat and the rectitude and solidity of somebody
rather like my father. It may echo the clash which he and I had. We got on
pretty well, but we were like chalk and cheese. So, there is an element of my
own life in it but it’s seventy percent out of my imagination.
