by Mark McCrum
Below them, beyond the deserted tables of the darkened deck six bar, the white wake of the ship bubbled away in a flat, narrowing line into the blue-black night. To the side, the sheer drop down to the ocean was dizzying.
‘You wouldn’t want to fall in there, would you?’ she said.
Francis shivered and held the rails tightly too, his old vertigo kicking in. ‘You wouldn’t,’ he agreed.
Sadie flung her profile upwards. She had a lovely retroussé nose above those frankly rather sensual lips. ‘Check these stars,’ she said, turning. ‘So bright out here, you feel you could reach out and touch them.’ She sighed. ‘That’s the thing I like most about Africa. The night sky. And the sunsets,’ she added.
‘And the space,’ said Francis. ‘Just the vastness of it.’
‘You’ve been to this continent before?’
‘I lived here. Some years ago.’
‘You never mentioned that.’
‘Nobody asked me.’
‘Even when Klaus was telling us about his great expedition to the tree where Stanley met Livingstone.’
‘Yes, well, there is a virtue in not sharing everything, don’t you think?’
‘I’d say.’ She turned and gave him a long, approving look. ‘You’re very English, you know that.’
‘Shall I take that as a compliment?’
She laughed. ‘You should. That’s exactly the sort of thing I mean. “Shall I take that as a compliment?”’ she repeated, in a poor imitation of his accent. ‘Very Downton Abbey. So where were you in Africa? What were you doing?’
‘Something a bit like you, I suppose. Helping out in a school in Swaziland. It was only for six months. After I left college.’
‘When was that?’
‘A while ago.’
Francis was vain enough not to want to say how much of a while. But without dating his experience, he gave Sadie the gist of it. How, too, he had hoped to identify with the heritage of his Botswanan birth father, but had soon realized that what he had in common with the kids he was teaching had nothing to do with skin colour. Indeed, the whole experience had made him realize just how British he was.
When they went back down to the bar, half an hour later, Klaus and Marion had gone off to bed.
‘Separately, I hope,’ laughed Sadie.
The glamorous Asian and the old white guy with the suspect hair were the only ones left at the bar. His shapely younger partner, if that’s what she was, was out on the little circular dance floor, twirling round and round to the music on her own. She looked sad, and not entirely sober, stumbling a little on some of her turns.
‘Lively scene,’ said Sadie. ‘You want a nightcap?’
‘Maybe I’ll pass on that.’ Francis yawned. ‘There’s an early start tomorrow.’
‘Yes, Togo, exciting. A bit of real Africa.’
They went out together past the library and down two decks to discover they were sleeping on the same corridor.
‘I’m right opposite you,’ Sadie said, inserting her keycard in the wall slot with a giggle.
‘See you in the morning,’ Francis replied.
‘If those pirates keep away.’ She winked.
He fell asleep to the soft rolling motion of the ship; the low hum of the distant engine; the gentle rustle of the sea on the hull. He imagined what it might be like, making love to a woman, in this bed, with these soothing sounds in the background. But no. That was absolutely not what he’d come for.
TWO
Lomé, Togo. Saturday 22 April.
As the guests teetered slowly down the wobbling gangway at nine a.m. the following morning, a posse of dancers was waiting for them on the quay, the low sun casting their long shadows across the grey, oil-streaked oblong cobbles. The women were in crimson bikini tops, their fleshy upper bodies criss-crossed with strings of white shells, long wraparound red skirts above blue flip-flops below. The men beside them wore matching red shorts, half obscured by ankle-length skirts of hempen rope. To the beat of a group of seated drummers they were all boogying together in that rhythmic, hip-swirling movement that Africans call ‘toyi-toyi’.
Three or four were more outlandishly dressed. One wore silver boots beneath baggy, blue, floral-patterned trousers. Layered over these was a wide skirt of oval hoops covered with a gold and orange peacock-feather design, each with a border of glittering turquoise. Over his – or was it her? – face was a black mask, with white eye sockets and a long ‘beard’ of shiny gold fabric. Above that, a flat, wide-brimmed hat, hung with orange tassels, was crowned with a ring of carved ebony mannequins. The other outfits were equally bizarre and splendid.
Now from one side into the centre of the circle came two more figures, raised up high on wooden stilts, to which their legs were tightly bound with rope. Their faces were masked too. One had white sockets for eyes and mouth; the other was an elephant man, with a dangling yellow trunk where his mouth should be. Turning towards the shuffling whiteys, they waved their black-gloved hands in studiedly slow motion. If this were a welcome, Francis thought, it was a decidedly ghoulish one.
Cameras were nevertheless out en masse to record this first flavour of exotic Togo. Fit, bronzed Damian had a lens as long as a paparazzo’s; he was scurrying and crouching all over the quay to get the shot he wanted.
Beyond stood a smiling line of expedition staff: six fit-looking guys and a glam, gym-toned blonde, all in khaki. Their lanky leader, Viktor, was another German, his long grey-brown hair tied back in a neat ponytail. ‘Gu-u-ten Mo-orgen!’ he cried, echoing the call with which he had woken the ship’s company over the tannoy at seven a.m. Now his arm was stretched genially out towards two waiting coaches. Francis watched Klaus step up into the almost-full first one, then he discreetly took his place in the second. Towards the back he found Eve sitting alone by a window.
‘May I?’ he asked, indicating the seat opposite.
‘Of course. Aren’t they wonderful?’ she said, nodding at the dancers. ‘You can see why I like to go on cruises. We never get this sort of thing in Malmesbury.’
Two open-backed Jeeps accompanied the coaches as they drove up from the port and into the wide, dusty streets of Lomé. They were manned with beefy guys in black shirts and flat caps which read POLICE in bold white letters; they had guns at their waists and were carrying batons like hefty black baseball bats. As their blue lights flashed and sirens blared, the near-stationary traffic grudgingly opened to let them through. Only in Africa, thought Francis, do tourists get the presidential treatment.
From the front of the coach a skinny, high-cheekboned local guide, Didier, gave the guests a running commentary on the sights of the capital, which seemed to be mainly a number of huge and gleaming new buildings erected by the Chinese. In between, he kept up a stream of facts: the average life expectancy in Togo – sixty-one for women, sixty for men; the forty different ethnic groups; the official language of French, the main local languages of Kotokoli and Ewé. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I shall teach you a few important words of Ewé. When I greet you on the road I say, “Woezo!” To which you must always reply, “Yo!”’
This went down well with the guests, with a particularly loud ‘Yo!’ coming from big Shirley, who was up the front of the coach with her goateed husband squashed in beside her.
‘Some people just love getting into these native customs, don’t they?’ said Eve, raising her eyebrows. ‘You almost get the feeling that they prefer them to their own.’
As the city dwindled away into dense green bush, Didier’s stream of information was replaced by a more lyrical commentary. ‘Now we leave Lomé, you will see our landscape here in Togo is very beautiful. Green, green, green. I will stop talking now and leave you in peace to contemplate the nature.’
He was silent for all of a minute before an amplified low humming filled the coach. ‘And there on your right,’ he continued, ‘a mango tree.’ There was another short break, then he had brought the microphone back to his lips for more soft singing. Then:
‘These trees with big leaves, we call them Tik.’
‘Very chatty, isn’t he?’ said Eve.
Way out in the countryside, the buses came to a halt by an empty field. Before the guests were allowed to disembark, Viktor introduced his colleague Leo, the only black face on the expedition team, who was from Nigeria and a herpetologist, if people knew what that was.
‘An expert on herpes,’ came an Australian voice.
‘Funnily enough, no,’ said Leo.
‘Snakes!’ shouted Shirley.
‘Correct.’ Leo smiled broadly. ‘Snakes. Now the good news is that most African snakes are not aggressive. But you will still need to take care, especially if you leave the village and wander off into the bush. Sometimes you will find puff adders sleeping in the sun, and they can look exactly like small sticks. Should you tread on one, it would almost certainly bite. The venom is very slow acting, and we do of course carry the antivenom serums for the common varieties of West African snake with us in the field, but obviously it’s all much better if everyone is careful.’
‘Goodness!’ said Eve, when he’d finished. ‘What a continent this is! If the Yellow Fever doesn’t get you, the snakes will. Luckily I’ve got my little Saint Christopher with me.’ She tugged at a gold medal on a slender chain around her neck. ‘He’s always looked after me. From the South Seas to the icebergs of the Antarctic.’
Out in the field two rows of women were waiting for them. They wore colourful headscarves, uniformly pink blouses and long patterned cloths for skirts, and danced and sang as they rattled orange gourds in front of them. Each gourd was wrapped in an elaborate criss-cross weave of coloured beads and buttons, which spoke all-too eloquently of the difference in lifestyle between these lean dark faces and muscled bodies, and the flabby white figures who passed between them, grinning sheepishly beneath their designer shades.
Beyond this welcoming gauntlet was the ‘typical Ewé village’ that the glossy itinerary had promised: round huts of clay brick with thick, overhanging thatch – rondavels as the South Africans call them. Dotted here and there were more modern breezeblock buildings with roofs of corrugated iron.
Under an open shelter sat a weaver at an old-fashioned loom working patiently on a length of cloth with a gorgeous parallelogram pattern of orange, black and green. He was soon surrounded by clicking cameras; everyone trying to get the shot that didn’t include other white visitors.
With Didier leading, there was a move towards the schoolhouse, where four rows of children had lined up to sing ‘Frère Jacques’. Little golden-palmed hands clapped obediently as their teacher looked on, smiling solemnly as he clutched his big stick. Brad knelt to one side as Damian snapped away.
Eventually the expedition staff rounded up their charges and led them over to an area where a presentation was to be made to the village chief, who was sitting under a large, shady tree with a white enamel mug full of wild flowers on a rickety table in front of him. He was a gentle-looking fellow, wearing a navy-blue fez decorated with a golden star and crescent moon. You’d rather be up before him for some transgression, Francis thought, than the dead-eyed thug seated to his right, in the black hat with the broad white band, who was ‘the village head man’. Other men sat on benches immediately behind, with a crowd of teenaged boys and women standing silently behind them.
It was Henry and Daphne Forbes-Harley (today in a stylish cream cloche hat) who were formally handing over the ship’s gift, which lay waiting on a table to one side. This was a collection of useful items for the village school: pencils, masking tape, pads, biros.
‘Total value probably thirty dollars.’ Francis turned to see Sadie right behind him. She was looking, if possible, even better than he remembered, in a loose green top and tight white jeans.
‘Presumably,’ he replied in a low voice, as Daphne burbled on graciously in the background, ‘some actual cash has also changed hands.’
‘You reckon? I wouldn’t be so sure.’
Across the clearing, the chief smiled and replied with a few words in Ewé, which Didier translated into English. The chief very much hoped, he said, that the honoured guests had enjoyed what they had seen. They were very welcome in his village, and his people were very grateful for the gifts they had brought. ‘And maybe, too,’ Didier added, in words that now seemed to be his own, ‘what you have seen is that what you have, with all your possessions, does not in fact reflect the level of happiness so much. As you see, they are content here with very little. So now the children are going to show you how they are happy from the heart.’
‘Art?’ said Henry, loudly, looking round at the villagers with a troubled expression. In his white topee, khaki shorts and long socks in brown brogues, he looked like a relic of Empire, Cecil Rhodes inspecting the troops. ‘Where?’
‘From the heart, darling,’ Daphne replied, grabbing his arm as he meandered off towards the huts.
‘Oh.’ He smiled round at Francis. ‘I thought they said “art”. I thought we were going to see some primitive acrylics or something.’
‘Henry!’
‘That might have been nice. Don’t you think, Tom?’
As Francis smiled, and there was a gentle titter around the clearing, the beautiful children opened their lungs again, in Ewé this time.
‘Sweet,’ said Sadie. ‘Though if one of them gets sick from malaria, or Dengue or Lassi fever, they may not be so happy from the heart then. The healthcare in this country is not good. There’s something like one doctor to every thirty thousand people.’
‘Is that right?’
‘’Fraid so: a) they don’t have the facilities to train any more up and b) a lot of them go abroad to practise. To Europe and the US, if they can. Or else they train abroad and don’t come home. Why would they?’
The coaches made their way off the flat green plain and up a narrow, winding road through thick jungle. This was more like the Africa of imagination, with deep green foliage still dripping and steaming from the night’s rainfall. High on a hilltop, they arrived at a second typical village, which reminded Francis of one of the little places in the mountains of Provence, with tall, shady trees around a central square, though you would never have found dancers like this in the south of France, toyi-toying barefoot in bikini tops and long skirts, their ebony shoulders and backs painted with elaborate patterns of white spots. Market stalls ran out along the roadside, where traders were selling scarves and hats and Mandela shirts and masks and carved wooden figures of tribesmen and elephants and kudu and all the other typical African souvenirs. The visitors were not ashamed to bargain, indeed many seemed to regard it as their duty to beat these impoverished people down to the lowest possible price.
‘How much does this cost you to make?’ Colonel Joe was asking a gaunt woman with sunken bloodshot eyes, who was selling colourful necklaces and bracelets. ‘No, don’t tell me how much you want, just tell me straight, how much does it cost you to make? You get the beads wholesale, right?’
He turned away from her with a confident grin. ‘I was taught how to do this in a souk in Morocco,’ he told Francis. ‘You basically divide the asking price by ten, and then work up from that. Never show you like the merchandise. It’s all a game. They basically only respect you if you’re prepared to play along.’
Eve had bought a pair of tall, kissing lovers in shiny ebony. She had paid the asking price. ‘It seems rude not to,’ she told Francis. ‘They’re going to fit beautifully in my little travel cabinet back home. I have stuff from all around the world, you know, and I’m constantly adding to it. One day it will be quite a collection.’
On the far side of the square was a barn-like building with a corrugated-iron gable roof but no walls, where rows of chairs and long wooden tables had been laid out. Oval steel catering dishes were piled high with chicken on skewers, sliced avocadoes, quartered egg on halved tomatoes, rice, chips, green salad, baguettes. There was even a dish of rather orange-looking prawns.
As Francis stood in line with Eve,
Klaus approached. He was wearing a colourful scarf and holding up a silver hip flask he’d removed from his bulky khaki shoulder bag. He took a swig and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
‘Visky?’ he offered. ‘In Africa I always do this. Before and after you eat, believe me, it is wise. Look at that – prawns, delicious, but how far are we from the sea up here? In this heat? I swear by visky sandvich. It has never let me down.’
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ said Eve; she had already helped herself to the seafood and clearly wasn’t going to be put off her choice.
‘Before is more important,’ said Klaus, waving his flask at Francis. ‘Are you certain you want to risk those?’ he added to Eve.
‘I’m sure Goldencruise have vetted everything thoroughly,’ she replied tersely. ‘They look fine to me.’
‘I see you bought a scarf,’ Francis said, to change the subject.
Klaus ran it between his fingers. ‘The least I could do. I appreciate that these guys are how-to-say con artists. The scarves are made in China most likely, like all the smart new buildings in Lomé.’ He laughed loudly at his own joke. ‘But there’s no harm in a little redistribution of wealth, is there? What’s fifty dollars to me? I would pay much more than this in Hamburg. And here I have a souvenir. And when I get home and decide I don’t like it after all, I have a Christmas present for my daughter-in-law.’
Discover Africa’s voodoo past, during a mysterious and memorable ceremony in a typical Ewé shrine, the itinerary had promised, and after lunch the coach was full of jovially nervous anticipation. ‘Voodoo, oh my!’ called one American voice from a seat just in front of Francis. ‘I do hope we’re going to make it back to the ship.’
‘But you must not be afraid of voodoo,’ Didier replied, in his gentle sing-song voice. ‘Hollywood has made it into this frightening idea, but it is really just a word from our local language of Ewé. It means “sacred”.’ The religion of voodoo, he added, was followed by some fifty-five per cent of Togo’s population.
