The young American lawyer didn’t try to define the glamour of the life. But I thought it would be something like this: being in Africa, being a non-African among Africans. Discomfort and danger would add to the sense of the self, the daily sense of personal drama, which a man living safely at home might never know. Africa called to people for different reasons. Everyone who went and stayed had his own Africa.
And then—after Yamoussoukro and the crocodiles, and what I had heard (and believed) about the heads—I had a bad night. I dreamed I was on a roof or bridge. The material, of glass or transparent plastic, had begun to perish: seemingly melted at the edges. I asked whether the bridge would be mended. The answer was no. What had been built had been built; the roof or bridge I was on would crumble away. Was it safe, though? Could I cross? The answer was yes. The bridge was safe; I could cross. And in the dream that was the most important thing, because I wasn’t going to pass that way again.
The buildings of Abidjan, seen in the morning mist of the lagoon, seemed sinister: proof of a ruler’s power, a creation of magic, for all the solidity of the concrete and the steel: dangerous and perishable like the bridge in my dream.
12
ANDRÉE, Arlette’s friend and fellow West Indian, telephoned from the university. Andrée’s message was that her patron, Georges Niangoran-Bouah, the Drummologie expert, had returned from the United States. He sometimes went there, to universities that offered courses in “black studies.”
When I went to the little office in the Institute of Ethnosociology I found a big and very black man, filling the big swivel chair behind the big desk. Without him, when Andrée was there alone, with her knitting, the office had seemed widowed. He had the physique of a chief, heavy flesh on his chest, folds of fat on his stomach; and the light-grey, short-sleeved sports shirt did not hide his size. His French, though accented, was clear and precise. His manner, a lecturing manner, was that of the French academic. He had been publishing sociological papers for twenty years. The note I had had about him said he was fifty-five; but he looked ten years younger.
He was pressed for time—he should have been with a class. But he outlined the ideas behind his Drummologie studies. The earliest European travellers in West Africa didn’t know African languages. So, though they observed a lot, they also missed a lot. They were wrong about the talking drums. The drums didn’t invite people to special feasts or beat out messages through the bush: “A white man is coming.” Drums were far more important than that in West Africa. To Africans it wasn’t the word that existed in the beginning; it was the drum. Africans said, “In the beginning was the drum.” Drumming, and the chanting that went with it, were special skills, handed down through the generations. The drum mimicked human speech; a trained singer could re-discover, in a particular passage of drumming, a poem, an incantation, a piece of tribal history, a story of victory or defeat.
Drums were sacred objects, symbols of the king, the tribe, the state. And Mr. Niangoran-Bouah opened his book and showed photographs of famous tribal drums to prove his point. One drum was hung with jawbones, another hung with cervelles, the brains of enemies, wrapped up in skins. That was how important drums were to the tribe. Another photograph showed the great royal drum of the Baoulé people, the Kwakla drum, matted with the blood of many sacrifices. Some drums were so sacred they weren’t allowed to rest in the ground. There was a recent photograph—taken by someone from the Institute of Ethnosociology—of a drumming-and-singing ceremony in which the great drum rested on the head of a slave—or so Mr. Niangoran-Bouah said.
The man said to be a slave was a muscular, shifty-looking fellow. He looked shifty perhaps because of the camera, at which he was glancing out of the corner of his eye; perhaps because of the weight of the drum and the din of the drumbeat just above his head (a small, bright-eyed old man, standing behind the drum-bearer, was pounding away with sticks on the drum); and perhaps because while the other men, elders and performers, wore their African cloths off the left shoulder, he, the drum-bearer, had to bare his chest and—in addition to supporting the drum with his left hand—had to keep up his cloth just above his waist with his right hand.
Mr. Niangoran-Bouah found the photograph full of interest. He clearly relished these ceremonies, coming down from the African past. Pressed for time as he was, he examined the photograph in detail with me, and said, “If the slave drops the drum he will be killed.”
I said, “Killed?”
“But yes.” Then he qualified what he had said. “In the old days. Today they would probably sacrifice an ox or an animal.”
“Are there still slaves in the villages?”
Mr. Niangoran-Bouah said in his lecturer’s manner, “Slavery is of two sorts. In matrilinear societies slaves are taken into the tribe. They father children for the tribe. In patrilinear societies slaves are—slaves. Today of course there are no slaves. But”—and Mr. Niangoran-Bouah smiled and threw back his chest and something of the chief’s grand good humour came to him—“a man in a village cannot conceal his ancestry. Everybody knows that this one or that one is the son or grandson of a slave.”
Somebody, a colleague or a student, came into the office and said that the class was waiting, had been waiting for half an hour. Mr. Niangoran-Bouah stood up, gave me an appointment for a few days ahead—he wanted to play me a few recordings of drums—and went off to his lecture on some aspect of African civilization.
I HAD DINNER at the Brasserie Abidjanaise. The French proprietress was soft and large and lacy, dreamy-eyed but commanding. She made me feel I had to be careful. The uniformed waiters, deferential to her and her ideas, were stern about the ritual of the house. The big balloon glasses were for wine, and wine was to be drunk only out of those glasses: I hadn’t, after all, been careful enough. Later, at the Forum Golf Hotel, it was the Soirée Africaine: seven topless, big-breasted girls dancing to the sound of drums in La Cascade, the garden restaurant beside the swimming pool. Always, in Abidjan, these two holiday Africas, the French and the African. And the African was more real and rooted than might be supposed.
ANDRÉE sat at her desk by the window and did her knitting. With Mr. Niangoran-Bouah in his swivel chair, the scene was almost domestic. (The influence of literature, the influence of the French language! I saw Andrée as French; and fleetingly, though knowing it to be absurd in the setting, I saw her as a Balzac character.)
Mr. Niangoran-Bouah was in the same grey sports shirt. He had a big tape-recorder on his desk; he was ready to play his recordings. But I had heard a fair amount about the drums, and I wanted him to talk instead about burial customs. I thought the subject might be a touchy one, but Mr. Niangoran-Bouah was only too willing to talk about burial customs. He was fascinated by all aspects of traditional African life, and his attitude was purely descriptive. He didn’t seem to think that these African things had to be either judged or defended.
When a big local planter died, his foreign labourers panicked and ran away. Mr. Niangoran-Bouah told this as a funny story. “Ils se sauvent.” (“They scamper.”) And he slipped one open palm off the other to suggest people running away fast.
African burial customs, he said, were like those of ancient Egypt. People believed that after death they continued the life they had lived on earth. So a man needed his wives and servants to go with him when he died. Some wives and servants understood this and accepted their fate. For those who didn’t want to be buried with their master there were sanctuary villages. Mr. Niangoran-Bouah drew a rough diagram on the back of an envelope. This showed that for every village there were, at different points of the compass, and within easy reach, four established sanctuary villages. But wives and servants looking for sanctuary had to be sharp. They had to get out of the way before their husband or master died. Once they had made it to a sanctuary village and claimed the protection of the chief there they were safe. Still, not everybody could be trusted these days, and there could be accidents. That was why the government had decreed that the burial of c
hiefs and other important men should take place publicly. That was why there was so much about funerals on television and in the newspaper.
It was a poor life in the spirit world, Mr. Niangoran-Bouah said. He spoke with feeling; I was surprised. He forgot his good humour, his lecturer’s manner. The dead needed money from the living. The dead had no clothes, had no money to buy clothes, and they were cold—and Mr. Niangoran-Bouah plucked at his own grey shirt. The dead had no food and were hungry—and the big man made a gesture with his fingers of taking food to his mouth. Because life in the spirit world was so wretched, Africans couldn’t really believe in the Christian after-life. For Africans the good life was here and now, on earth. The end of that life was the end of everything good.
“So African Christianity is an African religion?”
Mr. Niangoran-Bouah said, “I am a Christian. The first in my family. But I am attached, profoundly attached, to African animist belief.”
Djédjé, an altogether simpler person, had said much the same thing.
Arlette came into the office. She was chewing an aromatic gum, and she sat and talked quietly with Andrée, out of whose silent, busy knitting needles, and subdued “nervousness,” there was emerging a fantastically coloured little garment.
With a quarter of my mind, while Mr. Niangoran-Bouah talked, I wondered—so far, after Yamoussoukro and the crocodiles, and the heads, and my own dream about the decaying bridge and general dissolution, had I been drawn into Mr. Niangoran-Bouah’s spirit world—I wondered how Arlette had, as if in a novel or a play, and at another level of reality, walked into the office at that moment. And then I remembered. Arlette and Andrée were not only compatriots and friends; Arlette had also arranged my meetings both with Andrée and Mr. Niangoran-Bouah; Arlette worked in the university.
But if the here and now was all that mattered to Africans, as Mr. Niangoran-Bouah said, how did magic and the gods and the spirits fit in? Was it my own fantasy, that idea I had had of the two worlds in which Africans lived? Or was that double or twin reality something associated only with the lost slaves on the other side of the Atlantic?
I tried to find a suitable question.
I said, “Is it real for Africans, the European world? This city they have built here in Abidjan—do Africans consider it real?”
And I was so taken by what Mr. Niangoran-Bouah said that I asked for a sheet of paper to write down his words. Gently, like someone performing a welcome domestic duty, Andrée put down her knitting and gave me three sheets of thick new paper.
I wrote: “The world of white men is real. But, but. We black Africans, we have all that they have”—and Mr. Niangoran-Bouah meant aeroplanes, cars, rockets, lasers, satellites—“we have all of that in the world of the night, the world of darkness.” (“Le monde des blancs est réel. Mais—mais—nous avons, nous autres africains noirs, nous avons tout cela dans le monde de la nuit, le monde des ténèbres.”)
So that at night Africans today—like the slaves across the Atlantic two hundred years ago—lived in a different world.
Arlette, still chewing—but gripped now by our conversation, since Andrée had broken off to give me the paper—Arlette, eyes bright, said, “Ils pratiquent la nuit.” (“They do it all at night.”)
And in some ways Africans had exceeded Europeans, Mr. Niangoran-Bouah said. Europeans could achieve only limited speeds, even with their rockets. Africans existed who could convert themselves into pure energy. Such an African might say, “Let me be for a while.” And when after a second or so of concentration he came to again, he might give you news of Paris. Because in that time he had been to Paris and come back; and he had talked to people in Paris. So, without leaving Africa, a man might see his son in Paris and talk to him. But there could be no touching during those meetings. The man in Africa wouldn’t be able to touch his son in Paris, because a man could maintain his physical footing in only one place.
“They have doubles,” Arlette said. “They send their doubles. That is why they cannot touch.”
“There are people in the villages today,” Mr. Niangoran-Bouah said, “who can give you news every night of Paris and Russia. And they are certainly not getting it on the radio.”
Arlette, explaining this African gift, spoke of the Dogon people in the north. They had a great knowledge of astronomy, especially about the star Sirius, and they were said to be in touch with extra-terrestrial spirits.
So the world absolutely changed at night for Africans?
I understood Mr. Niangoran-Bouah to say that it did. “We say that a woman is stronger at night than a man.” (“La femme la nuit est plus redoutable que l’homme.”) “The sick beggar you see begging alms all day on the pavement is really in the world of the night a great dignitary.” (“L’infirme ou le malade mendiant que nous voyons tout le jour sur le trottoir en train de demander de quoi vivre est en réalité par le monde de la nuit un grand dignitaire.”)
The electric light in the office went out.
Mr. Niangoran-Bouah, jovial, made a French exclamation. “Catastrophe!”
Andrée was reminded by the power failure that she had to make a telephone call. But now, she said, because the electricity had gone it wasn’t possible. Mr. Niangoran-Bouah said the telephone worked on a different line. So Andrée put down her knitting and dialled. But the telephone, though working on a different line, gave trouble.
Mr. Touré, the head of the Ethnosociology Institute, not a big man, slightly military-looking in his near-khaki safari suit, came in with some banknotes in his hand. He gave the notes without ceremony to Mr. Niangoran-Bouah and Mr. Niangoran-Bouah—rather like the village chief at Kilometre 17—held the notes in his hand while he talked.
I asked, “When does the world of the night begin?”
Mr. Niangoran-Bouah said slowly and seriously, “As soon as the sun goes down.”
Arlette said that in some parts of Abidjan electric light was altering the hours of the night, and interfering with the powers that came into play. There was a friendly altercation between Arlette and Mr. Niangoran-Bouah about this. I got the impression that Mr. Niangoran-Bouah was saying that electricity made no difference to the night world.
He went on to tell a story about men who could make themselves all energy. The darkest time of the colonial period, he said, was during the Second World War. And, as though the personal wound was still with him, he said it again, stressing the words: it was the darkest time. Arlette supported him. It was a time of forced labour; people were seized, as in the slave-catching days, and taken off to work on French plantations.
One old man was seized. He was bewildered; he didn’t know what his captors wanted. They began to whip him. He said, “Why are you whipping me?” They told him: “We want you to carry this load to that place in the interior.” The old man said, “Is that all you want? Is it for that alone that you are whipping me? To get this load to that spot? Well, if that is all you want, you go ahead.” They said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I mean what I say. You leave me here. You will get your load.” In the end they left the old man, thinking him mad, and when they got to where they were going—
“They found that he had got there before them,” Arlette said, finishing Mr. Niangoran-Bouah’s story for him, fixing me with her bright eyes, and nodding to the rhythm of her own words.
The old man had sent his double with the load. He had converted himself into pure energy.
It was a story that might have come from a Caribbean slave plantation two hundred years before. White men, creatures of the day, were phantoms, with absurd, illusory goals. Power, earth-magic, was African and enduring; triumph was African. But only Africans knew.
I asked Mr. Niangoran-Bouah about the crocodiles of Yamoussoukro and the sacrifice of the live chicken.
I had seen him academic, good-humoured, tender, passionate, always open. For the first time now I saw him momentarily at a loss. The crocodile ritual was not something he was willing to talk about. He said, “The crocodiles belong
to the president.” He added, “He feeds them.” Then he said, “The emperor of Abyssinia also had certain animals that he fed.”
Arlette, eyes twinkling, said the emperor of Abyssinia always kept a little animal with him. That little animal was his fetish.
Mr. Niangoran-Bouah didn’t comment on that. He reassumed his academic manner. He said, “There are three symbols of kingship in Africa. On the savanna, the panther. In the forest, the elephant. In water, the crocodile. The crocodile is the strongest creature in the water. With one blow of that tail it can kill a man. Or”—and Mr. Niangoran-Bouah brought his palm down sideways on his desk—“it can break this desk.”
The crocodile was wicked, méchant. It especially hated the dog. It was suicide to try to cross a crocodile lake or river in a pirogue if you had a dog with you; the crocodiles would certainly attack the pirogue and overturn it. Crocodile-hunters used the carcase of a dog as bait. The crocodile couldn’t live in salt water. There used to be crocodiles in the lagoon of Abidjan until a cutting was made to the sea and salt water was let in. Now there were no crocodiles in Abidjan, though recently there had been reports of sightings.
The crocodiles of the Ivory Coast: the more one heard about them, the more they held the imagination. And it became easier to accept, looking at Mr. Niangoran-Bouah’s photographs, that the swastika design on some Ashanti gold weights might have evolved from a simplified rendering of the crocodile: a creature all legs and snout and tail, murderous snout twisting or curving into murderous tail.
The Writer and the World: Essays Page 37
