Now the memory of that feeling had disappeared for good. Priscilla didn’t need to will it away: it simply vanished, expunged from her life story. She felt as if she’d witnessed a death right there, in front of her, at that moment. For she could no longer see the man, just a corpulent and vulgar body.
‘I’m going in the morning,’ he said.
‘Going where?’
‘I have to meet those fellows in Dubai. They’re still there. Kariakis persuaded them to stay until I get back.’
If a man is to be judged by the company he keeps, then Priscilla Motlantshe rued the day her husband had met George Kariakis. He was pre-eminent among a whole new class of middlemen who had emerged to service these new land deals. Suitable land had to be identified, local officials sounded out, wined and dined, and legal obstacles overcome – more often than not with a secret hefty contribution to the bank account of whichever official could change the rules.
After some poor press in the wake of the first few deals, these consultants – ever quick to spot a new opening – had started offering a public-relations service too. Kariakis’s latest PR offering purported to show what conditions were like for a group of workers in southern Sudan after their farm – formerly state-owned – had been taken over by a private company based in Dubai. The brochure made it look like a holiday camp. The residents had running water in their homes, lunch breaks under canvas awnings in the field, and a community club where they relaxed in the evenings. Children were filmed queuing to see the company doctor for a check-up, and a young European volunteer was shown giving English lessons to a class of eager women. It reminded Motlantshe of the black-and-white films the apartheid government’s Department of Public Information once produced. A whole generation of whites was persuaded that apartheid South Africa’s black population was ‘the happiest on the continent’. Same technique, new audience.
In the beginning, this new ‘carve-up’ of Africa, as academics and activists alike were calling it, was dominated by that breed of merchants who had always trawled through the continent, sniffing out the prospect of money-making with an unerring nose for a quick deal. Lately, more conventional players – international banks and private-equity firms – had been attracted to the business, drawn in by the oversize profit margins, like a pack of hyenas moving in on a kill. But in a business where personal contact was the key they often seemed flat-footed. And the undisputed ‘land king of Africa’, as the Financial Times had dubbed him, was George Kariakis, a half-Greek, half-Lebanese trader whose family had long-standing, if dubious, links with several African leaders of the old school – the ones who still found it difficult to make a distinction between the national coffers and their own bank accounts, especially the ones they held offshore.