African art, African civilization, the density of African response: after his colonial wounding, that was Mr. Niangoran-Bouah’s cause. In the Ashanti weights there was the beginning of writing and mathematics. In the chants that went with the ritualized drumming there were the beginnings of history and philosophy.
On the desk there was the big tape-recorder. At last he played some of his precious recordings: first the tribal song or ballad, then the drums that mimicked the beat of the words. It was impressive. I began to understand the richness of the material he had made his subject, and his passion to present this material adequately to Africans and the world.
He was going off that weekend with thirty of his students to a village. The chief had invited them for the yam festival, la fête des ignames, an occasion so important that in some villages the sacred drums were brought out and played. In the village he was going to that weekend there were to be sacrifices of cattle, perhaps five or six. He was excited by the prospect of his weekend in the country. These old African rituals were as meat and drink to him. They were part of his past, his religion, his soul. He was also a writer and an academic, and these mysteries were among the many African things that awaited his pen and camera and tape-recorder.
But—thirty students in a village? Where were they going to stay? What arrangements would be made for them?
Mr. Niangoran-Bouah said, “Oh, there’s a hotel.” I said jokingly, “So you are out in the field much of the time?” He gave his chief’s laugh. “All the time, all the time.” (“Toujours, toujours.”)
I left with Arlette. She admired Mr. Niangoran-Bouah and was pleased that the introduction she had brought about had worked so well.
I asked her about the crocodiles. “What does it mean, Arlette?”
She said, “Nobody knows. Only the president knows.”
From other people, Africans and Europeans, I heard more. I heard that before the president had dug his palace lake and put in his crocodiles, there had been no crocodiles at Yamoussoukro. I heard that the keeper of the president’s crocodiles was the president’s sister and that she was unmarried. I heard that crocodiles were more dangerous on land than in water; then I heard the opposite. I heard that the crocodiles of Yamoussoukro, by a particular movement of their heads, warned the president of danger to the state. And at the end I felt that it was as Arlette had said: the crocodiles, so feared, were meant to be mysterious, to be felt as a mystery, and only the president knew what they, and the ritual of their feeding, stood for.
13
ON SATURDAY, while Mr. Niangoran-Bouah was at his yam festival, Arlette went to Grand-Bassam, the old, abandoned (and in parts still derelict) colonial capital. In Grand-Bassam there was a vernissage—local painters, both white and black, and Haitian painters—in a restored, French-owned house of the colonial period. All cultural Abidjan was there—mainly expatriates, black and white; and in that cultural expatriate world Arlette was a figure. On Sunday Arlette went to Bassam again, in another party, for the expatriate Sunday treat of a swim in the ocean and a sea-food lunch in a beach restaurant.
She came back refreshed from that to take me in the evening to the house of Joachim Bony, ancien ministre, a former minister in the government, for an apéritif.
As a minister of education, Mr. Bony had for some time been Arlette’s patron, and she still held him in awe. She was unusually abashed in his presence, and very concerned for the dignity of the occasion. And it was only two days afterwards that I learned from her that, for allegedly plotting against the president, Mr. Bony had been a political prisoner for five years before being pardoned by the president.
Mr. Bony lived in one of the richer residential areas of Abidjan: green streets, big houses, big plots. A gate, a drive, a modern concrete house, many vehicles. He came out to greet us, a gracious brown-skinned man in his late fifties. He walked with a limp; one foot was twisted. He took us up some steps that led directly from the garden to his sitting room. The furniture was modern, glass and steel, everything matching. He closed the aluminum-framed glass door and turned on the silent air-conditioning.
The other guests were an Ivorian doctor and his French wife, people in their fifties. Both Mr. Bony and his Ivorian friend, the doctor, had gone to France in the same year, 1946. The friend had stayed in France for twenty-one years, in Toulouse. His wife was from Toulouse. He was black to Mr. Bony’s brown, and he was a physically bigger man. His wife said that when he had come back to the Ivory Coast from Toulouse he had spent more time in France than in Africa. But he had “re-integrated” himself into his family. He went to his ancestral village every weekend.
How did he spend the time there? He said he looked after his family land. On weekends, he said, he became a planteur. He added jokingly in English, “Gentle-man far-mer.” Wasn’t he a little detached now from African village ways and the religion that went with those ways? He said he wasn’t a believer (he meant in African religion), but in moments of crisis—he spoke with some amusement—he found himself willing to turn again to old beliefs.
I asked Mr. Bony about the president’s crocodiles. (I didn’t at that time know the story of Mr. Bony’s political fortunes.) He said—without awe, without hesitation—that the crocodile was the totemic animal of the president’s family. His own family totem was the panther. He explained: the panther was prudent and—Mr. Bony made a gesture with the fingers of his right hand—when he leapt he was sure.
Could a hen be a totem? Yes, the doctor said. Could a family change its totem? No, the doctor said. No, Mr. Bony said; a totem was something inherited, something that came from way back.
Mr. Bony’s manner was like that: direct, gentle, matter-of-fact, unawed. And just as he was the first person I had met to give a straightforward explanation of the crocodiles, so he was the first to understand my question about the president’s estates at Yamoussoukro. Some of the land would have been state land, Mr. Bony said; some would have been family land. The president’s family were much more than village chiefs. They were sous-chefs of a great African kingdom; they might be described as local viceroys. In the colonial time their power had been reduced. But they had retained their authority in the eyes of the people.
It was of religion that we spoke after the doctor and his wife left. Religion was fundamental in Africa, Mr. Bony said. There were two worlds, the world of workaday reality and the world of the spirit. These two worlds ceaselessly looked for one another. “Ces deux mondes se cherchent.” Mr. Bony didn’t speak of the world of the day and the world of the night. But soon in his conversation the world of the spirit became the world of the supernatural. The supernatural couldn’t be ignored, he said. He himself had had premonitory dreams of the deaths of his parents.
Europeans were inventive, creative people. That had to be allowed them. But because they stressed or developed only one side of man’s nature they seemed to Africans like children, and sometimes because of their talents they seemed like enfants terribles. It had been especially dismal for him, when he had travelled in the communist countries of eastern Europe, to see men reduced to units, treated as economic beings alone. That was why, though dependent on Europeans for so many things, Africans thought of themselves as “older” than Europeans.
Apéritif time was technically over; and Mr. Bony—as gracious as Arlette would have liked him to be—sent us away in one of his cars, through his watchman-guarded gates.
Two days later I heard about his political fortunes. It cast an extra, retrospective dignity on the man. And this dignity made more curious his interest in the supernatural.
The supernatural Mr. Bony had talked about was not specifically African. But in Africa you slid so fast, so easily, into other realms. Fraternité Matin, continuing the government war against bad magic (and at the same time obliquely spreading the word that in the Ivory Coast sorcery was a thing of the past), was reporting on practices among the Bété people. No one in Africa—according to Fraternité Matin—was thought to die naturally. A sorcerer
was always thought to be responsible, and suspected people could be put to terrible trials to prove their innocence. They were made to wear the dead person’s clothes; they were made to eat “the mutton of death,” mutton soaked in the juices of a putrefying corpse. Generally, among the Bété people, truth was obtained from suspected persons by dropping the sap of the “gôpô” tree in their eyes: it was believed that the eyes of the innocent would not be damaged by the gôpô.
And there had come my way a story which I didn’t know how to treat. A defective refrigerated container on the Abidjan docks—part of a cargo from the Ivory Coast to Nigeria—had begun to give off an offensive smell. The container had been opened; it was found to contain severed heads. Sacrificial heads, for export; technology at the service of old worship. Was the story true, or was it an expatriate-African joke? (The humour of both Africans and expatriates could have coincided in a story like this.) I couldn’t find out. All I could find out was that stories of this nature—and all the stories about poisoning, burials, the disappearance of children—were possessed by most expatriates. They lived with this knowledge of African Africa. But the Africa they kept in their hearts, the Africa they presented to the visitor, was the Africa of their respective skills.
14
THERE were expatriates and expatriates. The latest group, of women, had come from Harlem in New York. Not all were native-born Americans. Some, by their accents, had gone to the United States from the smaller islands of the English-speaking Caribbean. Another roundabout return to Africa: and they had come to spread their own kind of Christian worship. They had also come to Africa as to the motherland. They were ill-favoured, many of them unusually fat, their grossness like a form of self-abuse, some hideously bewigged, some dumpling-legged in short, wide, flowered skirts. They were like women brought together by a common physical despair.
Perhaps at the back of their minds was the idea that, being black, in Africa they could at last pass. But Africa was cruel: the Harlem ladies were among people with a sharp eye for tribe and status and physical carriage. Perhaps, with an opposite impulse, they had seen themselves as Americans, more advanced than the people left behind in the dark continent. But here too they were deceived: the Ivorians, when not blasé, deep in their own world, had a curious racial innocence. Whatever their motives, the Harlem ladies, having come to the Ivory Coast, had become shy. They seemed never to leave the hotel. Sometimes they preached to waiters, when they could catch a waiter alone; but generally they sat together in the lobby, and left their little tracts on the tables there.
The ladies were in the lobby—worn out from sitting, silent from doing nothing, and yet of overwhelming presence—when Arlette came for a farewell drink. We didn’t stay in the lobby. We went to the bar.
Arlette’s Africa was so different from the Africa to which the Harlem ladies had come. Shortly after we had met, she had said, when she was speaking of the failure of marriages between Ivorians and foreign women like herself, that to live in Africa and to understand its ways was to have all your old ideas unsettled. And that, Arlette had added, was a good thing. It was of her African learning that she chose to speak on this last visit, at first in the bar, and later, in the lagoon dusk, on the bar terrace.
She spoke of the two worlds, the world of the day and the world of the night, the two ideas of reality that made Africans so apparently indifferent to their material circumstances. She had seen it in the Ivory Coast, she said. Men of wealth and position could return easily to their villages at the weekend, could easily resume the hut life, could welcome that life. She had asked people from Ghana, now in chaos: “You were rich the other day. Now you are poor and your country is in a mess. Doesn’t this worry you?” And they had said, “Yesterday we were all right. Today we are poor. That’s the way it is. Tomorrow we may be all right again. Or we may not. That’s the way it is.” That was the way it was in the upper world. The inner world, the other world, continued whole. And that was what mattered.
I said, “So it wouldn’t matter to you if by some accident this city of Abidjan fell into ruins?”
Arlette said, “No. It wouldn’t matter. Men would continue to live in their own way.”
Some Frenchmen had come out from the bar on to the terrace, not warm now, the light a dusty ochre. They sat at the next table. They were businessmen. They took out papers and folders from briefcases and began discussions. One of the men became interested in Arlette. Exaggerating his attentions, he considered her legs, her big, full figure. She had her back to him and she didn’t notice. She was talking, and eating nuts and crisps as she talked.
In one of the conference rooms of the hotel there was a business conference of some sort, with many white men sitting at tables, listening to a man lecturing before a board: phantoms, preparing plans for things that were one day bound to perish. The sun was sinking in the haze of dust: the harmattan arrived at last on the coast. The lagoon was hazy; the far bank, lost in haze, was like a view from the temperate zone. To one side of the hotel works were going on in the grounds of new houses being built in this fast-rising area.
I said, “Arlette, you make me feel that the world is unstable. You make me feel that everything we live by is built on sand.”
She said, “But the world is sand. Life is sand.”
I felt she was saying what Hindus say as a doctrinal point, and feel as a truth in times of crisis: that life is illusion. But that was wrong: ideas have their cultural identity. And Arlette had arrived at her knowledge, her sense of the two worlds, by her interest in “esoteric studies” and African magic. This knowledge had come from her admiration of African tribal life: the chief’s gift of pardon, the annual ceremony of reconciliation, the initiation ceremonies in the sacred wood, when for three months seven-year-old boys were subjected to tests that gave them a new idea of the world and their place in it. The Hindu’s idea of illusion comes from the contemplation of nothingness. Arlette’s idea of sand came from her understanding and admiration of a beautifully organized society.
She spoke with passion; she spoke poetically. She nibbled all the time, and all the time the Frenchman at the other table was looking at her legs.
She had a high regard for the African wise man, the man venerated as the sage. There was such a sage at this moment in Abidjan, in the African district of Treichville. He was very famous; the president himself would have liked to show him honour. But the sage preferred to live where he lived, in the courtyard of a simple house in Treichville. He said that if he moved to the middle-class area of Cocody the people who needed his help wouldn’t be able to come to him. They would have to walk, not having money for taxis. And the watchdogs of Cocody would bite them.
Arlette said, “Some time ago I went back to Martinique to see my parents. It was horrible for me. The people of the Antilles are sick people. Their life is a dream. I will tell you this story. The plane back—it was a special plane—was delayed for two days. And that made me distraught. My mother was hurt that I should be so anxious to get away from her. I love my parents, but my anxiety to get away from Martinique exceeded my love for my parents. They are small-minded people over there, broken down by their history. Life is so big. The world is so big, but over there if a man gets a little job in a government department he feels he has done enough with his life. They think they are superior to Africans. But their life is a dream.”
I asked her about Yamoussoukro. Why build that great city, if the world was sand?
She said, “It is the president’s attempt to integrate Africa into the modern world.”
And I thought she meant that to build a city like Yamoussoukro was not to accept what it stood for as the only reality. Ebony, the poet and civil servant, had hinted at something like that. Ebony’s father had said to him, “I am not sending you to the school to be a white man or a Frenchman. I am sending you to enter the new world, that’s all.”
As we walked out we passed the Harlem ladies in the lobby.
Arlette said, “We get so many
people like them from the United States. Black people who come here to convert the Africans. They are like everybody else who comes to do that. They bring their own psychic sickness to Africa. They should instead come to be converted by Africa. They are mad.” (“Ils sont fous.”)
November 1982—July 1983
AMERICAN
OCCASIONS
Columbus and Crusoe
THE ADVENTURE of Columbus is like Robinson Crusoe. No one can imaginatively possess the whole; everything beyond the legend is tedious and complicating. It is so even in Björn Landström’s book, Columbus, which makes the difficult adventure as accessible as it can be made. The text itself is a retelling from the usual sources. The maps and illustrations are more important. The maps make medieval ideas of geography clear. The illustrations, a true labour of love, are numerous and exact: ships, the islands, the people, the weather, the vegetation, and even the Flemish hawk’s bell which delighted the natives until it became a measure of the gold dust the discoverer required them to collect.
In the legend Columbus is persecuted by many enemies; he goes back to Spain white-haired, in chains, and he dies in poverty and disgrace. It is Columbus’s own picture: he had a feeling for theatre. His concern for gold exceeded his sovereign’s: he expected to get a tenth of all that was found. The chains were not necessary; he was begged to take them off. He wore them for effect, just as, after the previous disaster, he had returned in the Franciscan habit. That disaster had its profitable side. He had sent back slaves, as he had always intended. He claimed, or his son claimed for him, that he had got rid of two-thirds of the natives of Hispaniola in two years; the remainder had been set to gathering gold dust. (This was an exaggeration: he had got rid of only a third.) Even after his disgrace he fussed about his coat-of-arms, appropriating a red field for the castle of Castile, as on the royal coat-of-arms. He complained to the end about his poverty, but one of his personal gold shipments, again after his disgrace, amounted to 405 pounds. His father was a weaver; his sister married a cheesemonger; his son married a lady of royal blood. And at his death Spain hadn’t gained very much. Mexico was thirteen years away; and the Indies, the source of his gold, where he thought he had discovered the Terrestrial Paradise, had become, largely through his example, anus mundi.
The Writer and the World: Essays Page 38
