Plot
Sociologist Dr. Homer Crawford, for many years the tyrant of North and most of Central Africa, under the name of El Hassan, faces a military coup led by his closest supporters, Bey-ag-Akhamouk and Elmer Allen, who believe Crawford is an impediment to Africa's progress because he opposes foreign aid and investment in the region. Promised a pension and safe passage if he submits, Crawford leaves Africa to retire to Switzerland with his wife Isobel and sons Tom, Cliff, and Abraham. After thwarting an assassination attempt by army officers on board his aeroplane, he makes it safely to Switzerland. Once there, his son Abraham reminds him that many of El Hassan's detractors (who include Abraham himself) were merely responding to his unwillingness to move from a dictatorship to a democratic government.
Six months later, now a frustrated semi-alcoholic, Crawford learns of a counter-coup in Africa by a dissident army cabal led by his old arch-enemy Abd-el-Kader. Most of the junta that deposed him have been shot, but Elmer Allen has managed to make it through to meet Crawford in Switzerland. Realizing that Abd-el-Kader will revoke his progressive programs, Crawford decides to contact his closest associates and return to North Africa in disguise. Allen and Abraham decide to accompany him.
The group rendezvous with Crawford's associates in an afforestation project in what was Southern Algeria. Crawford reveals that his plan for a counter-coup consists of a guerrilla campaign to divert Abd-el-Kader's troops so that Abraham has time to organize the country's youth to form a new political organisation against the ruling colonels. When Abraham expresses surprise at the plan, Crawford explains that his time has passed, and that now it is up to the next generation to revolt against the status quo. In a flashback of his last conversation with Isobel, we learn that Crawford does not believe he will survive the revolution this time around.
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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