The Governor of the Northern Province by Randy Boyagoda

haven’t started up yet, about the modern history of Atwenty, Bokarie’s first country.
    Jellyby learned from this documentary that the nation’s post-independence history was punctured and potholed by corruption and shifts in governance so frequent that the power grids left in place by the exiting English at the end of World War II were long since defunct. As were the basic mannerisms of civil society that the Empire had exported to the dark corners of the Royal Society’s maps. Things had turned rather carnal rather quickly.
    This wasn’t surprising to the nation’s last viceroy, a Sir Basil Seal, who was interviewed in his palsied paisley splendour for the documentary. Upon returning to the Home Country after his stint in Africa, he confessed that his time in Africa had killed what merry old Kipling had been in him since boyhood about life in the colonies, and brought him over to that nasty Conrad chap.
    One story he especially liked to tell when he was back in London, at sherry receptions and old headmasters’ funerals and now for this documentary that Bayard Jellyby was watching, described his last time with the natives. To his always captive audience, Sir Basil explained that before leaving, he had listened to the local bureaucrats, whose colouring and capabilities were modelled after Macaulay’s minute fiats for Bombay middle managers, flub those famous lips of theirs to express what a pity it was he and the British were leaving. They were a spot nervous over this exit and what the new power portended for them and their country. This came up during a melancholic farewell reception Sir Basil had held for them in the gingerly upright British barracks, though he knew some of the invitees had bloody well agitated for his going, dancing and clapping alongside the scruffier natives at their passionate, incoherent independence rallies. In response to their doe-sad eyes, he had loudly wished he could just stuff all of them in his steamer trunk and take them home with him, but of course this was right around the time that ugly Enoch Powell and his lot were bloodying up the streets. They were more worrisome, he assured them, than what life under the nation’s first homegrown prime minister would be like.
    The native mandarins weren’t naive; they expected the new Big Man to clean house and bring in assorted cousins-in-law and other village baboons to run the nation, just as the British had done to the French and the French to the Germans and the Germans to the first tribal leaders they had met. The first post-independence leader, a man of the People as they all are, was rather brutish. While he had been educated partially in England as a young man, he had spent more time at Oxford thrusting and grunting as all-school Eight Man and midnight caller for the dons’ girlfriends than he had spent studying gunpowder plots and suffrage politics.
    Sir Basil knew all of this, as he told the documentary’s host, but he also knew that he was only a week’s voyage away from trustable clotted cream and the glorious freedom to see a man about a dog without having to check the bowl for a scorpion first. So he did less than his best to buck up the black spirits around him at that goodbye get-together. But he concluded in full Britannic style, of course. On behalf of Her Majesty, he raised a toast to the newly independent nation and to its grand new leadership. To Kong and country! His gin-soaked slip of the tongue was neither copied nor corrected. It was taken as a closing colonial wisecrack and regarded, with false hope, as false prophecy.
    As the documentary then recounted, the new man burst through mere expectations of gluttonous vice and implacable incompetence. His inaugural act as prime minister was to neuter the parliamentary system into a self-appointed National Assembly, proclaim a democratic republic, and accept the title of President-for-life. He was the first of many in the decades