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been created equal. But if there was no God, there didn’t have to be equality either. Now he thought
he had managed to confirm this with his own eyes. The ox-drivers were another sort of human being. They had to be driven the same way that they drove the oxen. Even though he was only descended from a man with grinding jaws in Hovmantorp, in the depths of the poor, backward province of Småland, he was still the one who had to make the important decisions for these black people.
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    Just before he fell asleep, after placing the revolver under his pillow and the rifle on the ground next to his camp bed, he made his last notes of the evening. Once again he addressed himself to Matilda. These people, unfathomably dark in skin colour, cannot be compared to us. They belong to something else; perhaps they are more like animals. But they remind me of the paupers in Sweden. Their submissiveness, silence, ingratiating attitude. Today I discovered the role I have to play in this drama. I am confirming my own freedom. The desert is still far off. Now, just before ten o’clock at night, it is still very warm. I have already noticed that I’m waking up more easily in this heat and that my dreams are different.
    Then he blew out the candle.
    He didn’t write anything about his fear.
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    He woke in the middle of the night, jolted out of a dream. His father’s grinding jaws had been very close to him, like the jaws of a beast of prey. In the background he had glimpsed Matilda. She was naked, screaming that she was being raped by a group of soldiers with blue stripes glued to their naked bodies. She had seen him and called to him, begging him to help. But he hid, made himself invisible, and left her to her fate.
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    And yet it was not the dream that had woken him. When he opened his eyes in the dark he realised that he had been pulled out of sleep by something outside himself. He lay quite still and held his breath. The sweat was sticky on his body. It’s the oxen, he thought. At once he was wide awake. He was not in Lund now, nor Hovmantorp. Africa was a continent where snakes coiled and big cats came sneaking out of the darkness and bit animals’ throats. He fumbled for his rifle. When he felt the cold barrel he grew calmer. He listened in a different way.
But he hadn’t been imagining things; the oxen were restless. He lit his lamp, pulled on his trousers and grabbed the rifle. The fire was blazing. He glimpsed the oxen in the shadows just outside the light of the flames. The ox-drivers lay curled up around the fire, but when he counted the bodies he saw that one of them was missing. He checked that the safety was off on his rifle, shook out his boots and pulled them on. Then he walked carefully over to the oxen.
    He discovered Neka standing there. Fat, shapeless Neka. He had a whip in his hand. Slowly, as though he were driving the oxen in his sleep, he struck them on their backs. Bengler stopped. What he saw was utterly incomprehensible. One of the ox-drivers, in the middle of the night, naked with his fat belly jiggling, was slowly, as if in a trance, striking the oxen over and over. He thought he ought to intervene, snatch the whip from Neka’s hands, perhaps wake the others sleeping around the fire, and then tie Neka to a tree and have him flogged. Wackman had explained that there were plenty of men, both drivers and bearers, to be found on this strange continent, but good oxen were expensive and uncommon. So oxen had to be weighed against men, oxen protected while men could be discarded. Yet Bengler didn’t move. Neka seemed to be standing there striking the oxen in his sleep. He was staggering as if the blows of the whip were striking him, making his own flesh quiver and not the thick hide of the oxen.
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    Suddenly it was over. Neka dropped the whip and turned round. Bengler quickly retreated deeper into the darkness. If he were discovered he would have to intervene; punish Neka.