Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Down on the other side of the mountains was flat country with the peculiar hot silence of the bush invested, like power, in the monolithic growth of baobab trees; forms from the sophisticated imagination of a Miró, planked down in the nowhere. Morondava was a one-street town of Indian and Chinese shops, an old colonial hotel enclosed by jalousies, and a lovely beach with the Indian Ocean rolling in. I set off for the grave sites. First a visit to the chief’s village at Maravoay; this part of the island was once the kingdom of Sakalava and is still inhabited by Sakalava tribes, who are negroid, so the old man in a loincloth was unmistakably African. He refused permission to view the graves: recently somebody had sawn off grave figures and taken them away. While the driver protested my honest intentions, I was watching a woman making-up in a cheap store mirror, drawing a dotted pattern in white clay across her cheekbones and down her nose. Better housewives were occupied threshing rice. We had to return to Morondava to buy a bottle of rum; then the chief stiffly relented. We drove through dry winter bush from the village of the living to the village of the dead. In a clearing among paper-bark trees with livid trunks sloughing tattered parchment, were the small fenced allotments the dead occupy. These were all about six by eight feet, and the shoulder-high palings were decorated with finial carvings of birds and humans, and tall, totemic geometrical cut-outs, so that the place seemed peopled above ground as well as below. It was very quiet; I saw that butterflies were hovering everywhere.…

  The tombs I had seen in other areas were blind cement or stone structures, some with a kind of doll’s house on top, and the form that grave sculptures take also varies according to region. The Mahafaly sculptures farther south are totems, sometimes surmounted by miniature tableaux from the dead man’s life – his cattle, his house, his family; the horns of sacrificed Zebu cattle are part of the monument. The Vezo (a Sakalava tribe) sculptures around Morondava are unique in their eroticism. At Maravoay, among the representations of colonial messengers in de Gaulle caps, ladies in European blouse and skirt complete with high-heeled pumps and dangling handbag, there was a single couple shown in The Act, he, still wearing his messenger’s cap, peering rather nervously from behind her intimidatingly female body as if caught in an irresistible indiscretion while on duty.

  But at Ambato, a site a few miles up the coast among deserted sand dunes within view but not sound of the sea, the first sight of the village of the dead was of a village petrified in orgy. On the fifty-odd graves, couples – and an occasional threesome – are represented in almost all the common and uncommon variations of sexual intercourse. In this desolate place the sight comes as a statement rather than a spectacle: through the moment of man’s most intense experience of his own body, the assertion of his fecundity against nothingness. It has the audacity of a flag stuck on the moon.

  Of course, for a non-believer (in the context of ancestor-worship) it’s tempting to see the fierce joy of coupling as defiance of the loneliness of the grave, Andrew Marvell’s fine and private place where none embrace. But this is as subjective as my driver’s explanation that these dead had been ‘very fond of women’. Apparently the truth has little to do with either the grave occupants’ sexual capacity or resentment against death; the skilful lovers symbolise the fertility that, like all good things, comes to the living from the dead.

  While the clothed and painted figures are naive in conception and execution, and the partly-clothed couples lean towards caricature, many of the naked couples are works of extraordinary beauty and technical achievement. Since they are embellishment first and faithful representation only second, artistic licence is dictated by the necessity to show all positions as vertical. The way in which the sculptor has solved problems of form and volume in dealing with the interplay of limbs and bodies is often masterly. Some of the sculptures have a classical tenderness rather than the expressionism or symbolism associated with other ‘primitive’ sculpture. And there was one grave in particular where the total conception showed a complex creative vision: human couples were alternated with pairs of mating birds, the sacred ibis with their slender beaks affectionately intertwined, one pair linked by a small fish, its tail in the one beak, its head gripped by the other.

  Malagasy sculptors often hand down their art, not only from father to son but also from mother to daughter. A family tree of the sculptors of Iakoro hangs in the ethnological museum in Antananarivo. But the artistic tradition is dying out, the grave sites are not protected, and not one of the magnificent grave sculptures from Morondava is preserved in a museum in Madagascar. I righted a grave-post topped by a lovely bird that was being ground to dust by the jaws of ants; there were so many others, powdering into the sand. I suppose soon the only ones left will be those that appear, mysteriously (export is forbidden) in the rich art collections of Europe and America. There was that story of the old chief at Maravoay: ‘some people had sawn off figures and gone away…’

  Out of the cult of the dead, the oligarchy of the Merina, the oligarchy of the French that followed – the lolo of the Malagasy Republic that emerged in 1960 has had time to dry its wings in peace. President Tsiranana and his PSD (Social Democratic Party) – extremely conservative, despite the name – stay comfortably in power while on the mainland of Africa coups and counter-coups come and go. Tsiranana (of the Tsimihety tribe) and many of his top men are côtiers, and although they are anxious to prove that they stand for a democratic, non-tribal government and have largely succeeded, they represent the final defeat of the aristocratic Merina as well as independence of white rule. Yet the Merina with their monopoly of the capital province, their lingering caste system, their educational superiority and natural aloofness remain an overwhelming presence when you are on the island – their palace may be empty, but they are Madagascar as no other single element is. The French presence also remains in evidence, particularly in Antananarivo; the governor’s rose-coloured, tin-roofed palace becomes the French Embassy, the work of Boris Vian and Malraux being presented at the Centre Culturel Albert Camus, French food and wine in every restaurant (if you have to be colonised at all, how lucky to be colonised by the French). French culture ‘takes’, and survives political bitterness in her former colonies. Jacques Rabemananjara, Minister of Foreign Affairs, once one of the famous rebels exiled from Madagascar after the bloody 1947 uprising against France, is a Malagasy poet who writes in French, just as Senghor, poet and President of Senegal, belongs also to French literature. Whether due to French influence or the traditional oral culture of the Malagasy with its ankamantatra (riddles), ohabolana (proverbs), and anatra (good advice), often combined in short, sometimes erotic poems called hain-teny, Antananarivo publishes more newspapers than any place I’ve ever been. On the Escalier de Lastelle, among the booths selling cheap sunglasses and the island’s semi-precious stones, I counted fourteen Malagasy newspapers pegged up for sale round a cigarette stall; but there are, in fact, about 155, some in French, for a total population of six million people. Writing poetry seems to be a prestigious pastime; among the papers were privately printed booklets of amateur verse with the dim picture of a bespectacled teacher or civil-servant author on the cover.

  President Tsiranana, who needs only a lei round his neck to look like a welcoming Polynesian host in a travelogue, was a particularly close friend of General de Gaulle and no doubt will now embrace Pompidou as warmly. France remains the island’s main source of economic aid and biggest customer for its products, mainly stimulating, nourishing, sweet or fragrant – coffee, tobacco, rice, manioc, sugar, cloves and vanilla. The United States is next best customer; the trade began in pirate days when an American buccaneer vessel introduced Malagasy rice to North Carolina. The Malagasy I talked to were disappointed at the smallness of American investment and aid, though. In five years after independence the US gave only $13 million.

  The island can feed itself abundantly, but apart from nickel on the eastern side – and of course there is the inevitable oil-prospection going on – has none of the important min
eral discoveries that bring the white world flying in to promote development. For this reason it is making a late and hasty entry in the Island Paradise lists, and has begun a jet service that links it with the regular tourist run down Africa. Nossi-bé, a tiny island off the north-west coast of the main one, has been decided on as the main draw outside Antananarivo itself. And no wonder – you don’t have to drive to get there, and a short flight lands you in a place that really does seem to have escaped debased Gauguinism. Brilliant sugar cane lying stroked back, silky, in the breeze, sudden dark walls of tropical forest, coffee bushes flowering white rosettes, ylang-ylang perfume trees weirdly espaliered, great glossy-leaved mango trees ivied with pepper vines – the whole island rustles softly and breathes sweet. The government-owned hotel in a coconut grove on one of the beaches has a tiny casino under a banana-leaf roof where you can play baccarat (why is it presumed that at the end of getting away from it all, as at the end of the rainbow, there’s got to be a pot of gold?) but the real action was down the beach on Sunday morning, when two busloads of Sakalava arrived for some occasion I’m sure was more important than a mere picnic. On this shore of Madagascar, nearest to the East Coast of Africa and African and Arab influences along the ancient trade routes of the Indian Ocean, the lamba becomes a brilliant cotton robe worn by women – I could see the restless pollen-yellow, purple, red, orange, from afar. They wore elaborately filamented Arab-style jewellery on ears and necks, turbans, flowers picked from the forest that shaded the edge of the sand, and some used lipstick as well as sophisticated variations of the clay-patterned maquillage I had seen down south, at Maravoay. Drums, flutes and clappers entertained the company. They drank and ate from enormous black boarding-house pots that were then scrubbed clean in the sea by the painted ladies with their robes hitched up. The men put on smart nylon trunks from France and went in for a swim. Then the whole party was drummed, piped and clappered back into their taxis brousse.

  At the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa in 1963, President Tsiranana hopefully suggested that the Organisation’s title should include the words ‘and Malagasy’ after ‘African’; he was curtly told that if the Malagasy didn’t consider their state African, they had no place in the Organisation at all. But Merinas and côtiers alike, the islanders privately don’t really regard themselves as Africans even now, when for political and economic reasons as well as ancient geographical ones, their destiny is lumped in along with that of the Third World. Tsiranana, in addition to his natural conservatism, fears the proximity of the Chinese-Communist-controlled island of Zanzibar, and places Madagascar ‘without any bad conscience’ among the moderate African states in the OAU and not the revolutionary ones; but he also allows himself to have no bad conscience over the fact that the new jet service is run in collaboration with South Africa, and Madagascar is receiving trade missions from there, while the OAU condemns any contact with the country of white minority rule and colour bar. Of course, the agricultural machinery Madagascar buys from France would be so much cheaper, imported from nearby South Africa…

  It was only in my last two hours on the island that I went up to the queen’s palace that I had seen from my bathroom window in Antananarivo every morning. One of those neck-dislocating rides to see the sights: here the Presidential Palace (once the Royal Prime Minister’s) with its onion turrets and central glass dome of a steam-age exhibition building, there the old Royal tribunal, a Greek temple of pillars and pink stone – and then the group of strange mansions, large and small, that crowns the town and is known collectively as the rova. Beside the Manjakamiadana, the palace that Cameron turned to stone, is the Tranovola, the Treasury Palace, an enormous Victorian wooden doll’s house, its white verandah arches of cathedral proportion, and inside, delightful naive murals in which fruit, flowers and people’s eyes have the same open gaze. Beside the Tranovola, two tiny yellow-and-green pagodas on a stone platform – the royal tombs, to which the last Queen, Ranavalona III, was brought back from her exile’s grave in Algeria in 1938. Her palace is like a country house built by one of those decadently Europeanised Russians in Turgenev: partly English, partly Swiss cuckoo-clock, with an Italianate touch.

  Hidden among the decorative and architectural mannerisms of nineteenth-century England and Europe is Andrianampoinimerina’s original royal Great Place; I use the African term for a king’s quarters because ‘palace’ is too cheaply grandiloquent for this lofty shelter with tall crossed lances at either end of its steep roof. A dwelling like a tent made of thick black wood, divided internally only by the differentiation of the hearth from the rest of the tamped-earth floor. Round the walls are his carved wooden shields, his spears and muskets, and his drinking vessels made of clay given a pewter patina with graphite.

  The museum curator (we showed off to one another, agreeing that some of the palace murals were pure Douanier Rousseau) apologised for rushing me, but there was a Japanese trade delegation in town, and she was due to escort them through the palaces any moment; they arrived just as I left, very small and neat and alert with the magpie curiosity they carry everywhere. What had they come to Madagascar to sell? What had they come to buy?

  An hour later, waiting for the plane to take me away, I bought a newspaper and read an announcement that work had started in Antananarivo on the Madagascar Hilton. I remembered reading how President Tsiranana had once said, expressing the detachment of the Malagasy as well as a sly dig at Africa’s troubles, ‘If the Bon Dieu proposed to me that Madagascar should be rejoined to the African continent, I would ask him to let it remain an island.’

  Well, we all know that no man is an island; but no island is an island, either – not now. Can’t afford to be. From among the corpses and butterflies, the crook’d finger is beckoning, and sooner or later, for one reason or another the continents will close in.

  1969

  The 1970s

  Merci Dieu, It Changes

  Accra and Abidjan

  Ghana five years after Nkrumah. I didn’t ever see it in his time, but his presence has been so omnipresent in the consciousness of contemporary Africa that one approaches – at last – the physical reality of Accra in terms of a place where he once was. Black Star Square. The first of those vast independence celebration stadia that were built in country after country, and now stand, grandiose and deserted, eternally gouged of an occasion whose historical immensity, of course, can never come again. This one is backed by the huge rough seas that ride up the coast of West Africa. The empty arena looks lonely as power is supposed to be. The famous statue of Osagyefo isn’t there; some harmless Unknown Soldier enthroned in its place. What about the victims, said to be Nkrumah’s sacrifices to witchcraft, supposed to be buried there? Did they dig them up for decent burial, after the coup? Did they dig anyway, and find nothing? Is that what such legends are: the same nothingness, whether filled by the malice of white foreigners branding Africa eternally savage, or by the projected fears of bewildered Africans themselves?

  Going about the town, every day I pass Flagstaff House (army headquarters), the broadcasting station, and police headquarters. Colonial-looking entrances with white walls, flags, sentry boxes, and that ivy of Africa, splurgy bougainvillea, lounging over all. But it was here the coup took place, the young Major Afrifa and his soldiers marched in, those in power fired back or escaped out of windows, there was a few days’ confusion, a little blood, and it was done.

  The airport is renamed after Colonel Emmanuel Kotoka, a maker of the coup and victim of an abortive counter-coup a year later – he was taken there and shot. Accra is a lusty warren where the pressure of humanity overruns mere bricks and mortar and one hardly notices the buildings whose batteredness certainly predates the coup, but here and there are nameless edifices in Independence baroque whose expanse has no life behind it. In one, a window open, a piece of clothing hung out to dry; someone is perhaps camping within the shell. This was once the headquarters of the powerful United Ghana Farmers’ Council, which, alon
g with the women’s movement, became the only expression of the people’s will – and it seems he made sure their will was his – Nkrumah consulted once he had become both the Head of State and chief executive, Life Chairman and General Secretary of the governing Convention People’s Party, and no longer even held party congresses. Other landmarks interest me in a detached way; this one stops me short, with a private melancholy. There are so few African countries where the people who live off the land become a power and have a real say in the direction of government policy: it was a noble beginning, even if it went badly wrong, this time. I want to accost someone, anyone, in the street and tell him: as a Ghanaian, as an African, it must be tried again. And again and again.

  But to be white in the streets of Accra is to feel oneself curiously anonymous and almost invisible; one is aware of one’s unimportance, in terms of what a white face has meant and now means to people. To be white is to have been rendered harmless: a rather pathetic centuries-old monster the source of whose power-myth has been revealed to be mumbo-jumbo.

  Tema is a Sunday drive up the coast from Accra. It’s Nkrumah’s city in the way that a city is the possession of the man who has a beautiful scale model, tall buildings, perfect clover-leaf flyovers, miniature trees and gardens, cars and people – just as if it were real. Nkrumah must have had such a model somewhere in Christiansborg Castle. The half-realisation of Tema – the city has never been completed – shows that it would have been like all those Brasilias that have to go through a process of attrition by humans, in accordance with obstinate local styles of life that keep making nonsense of ‘international’ architecture. Meccano giants step up at every change of the car’s perspective. They climb down to the port, carrying power from the Akosombo Dam – in terms of surface, the biggest man-made lake in the world – to the Kaiser aluminium smelter. From a long green plain away, industrial towers proclaim a new faith in place of the single steeple among the huts that used to proclaim that other white man’s religion in African towns. The splendid roads loop and bend according to plan, but often debouch into a bank of weeds. There is a slope covered with good neat houses; against the walls of the refinery a shanty town made with packing cases has cooking fires smoking away – that’s underdevelopment, it’s a way of life dictated by necessity and as difficult to put an end to as to put out the grass fires that burn up Africa.