The Viceroy of Ouidah

by Bruce Chatwin

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  Praise for The Viceroy of Ouidah

  “A superb impressionistic piece of historical reconstruction . . . . This is one of those enigmatic books which might be handed to several friends who could afterwards be lured together for a diverting evening, when each declares what the message is. The prose coruscates, so that many images from this African horror story linger disturbingly in the mind.”

  — The Washington Post

  “A vivid, lush, seductive book that absolutely captures the look and light and life of the Brazilian wastelands and the hot, breathless African Slave Coast jungles. What an imagination Bruce Chatwin has!”

  — The Wall Street Journal

  “Robust firsthand observations . . . [The Viceroy of Ouidah] is bejewelled with glinting ironies and bizarre details.”

  — Newsweek

  “Truly wonderful ... Mr. Chatwin, author of that remarkable travel book In Patagonia, tells of Francisco Manoel da Silva, a poor adventurer from Bahia who makes a huge fortune in the slave trade; is appointed Viceroy of Ouidah, Dahomey’s port city; and then, after falling out with his royal patron, is stripped of his treasure, ending up a halfmad beggar on the streets of the town he once lorded it over. Mr. Chatwin, as readers of In Patagonia will remember, has a powerfully visual and aural style; sights and sounds crowd his sentences to the point that the book almost breathes. The narrative of da Silva’s rise and fall may be full of ironies and surprise turns and of outré incidents, but the real excitement is the prose.”

  — The New Yorker

  “It is a sad, barbaric, decadent story told beautifully and brilliantly. Admirers of Conrad and Malcom Cowley will relish it.”

  — The New Statesman

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE VICEROY OF OUIDAH

  Bruce Chatwin was born in 1940, and was the author of In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, and Utz. The last three he considered works of fiction. His other books are What Am I Doing Here, Anatomy of Restlessness, and Far Journeys, a collection of his photographs which also includes selections from his travel notebooks. Chatwin died outside Nice, France, on January 17, 1989.

  Beware and take care

  Of the Bight of Benin.

  Of the one that comes out

  There are forty go in.

  SLAVER’S PROVERB

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1980

  First published in the United States of America by Summit Books,

  a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1981

  Published in Penguin Books 1988

  eISBN : 978-1-101-50321-8

  Copyright © Bruce Chatwin, 1980

  All rights reserved

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  In the nineteenth century the Kingdom of Dahomey was a Black Sparta squeezed between the Yoruba tribes of present-day Nigeria and the Ewe tribes of Togo. Her kings had claw marks cut on their temples and were descended from a Princess of Adja-Tado and the leopard who seduced her on the banks of the Mono river. Their people called them ‘Dada’ which means ‘father’ in Fon. Their fiercest regiments were female, and their only source of income was the sale of their weaker neighbours.

  Abomey was the name of their upland capital. The name of their slave port was Ouidah (spelled Whydah by the British, or Ajuda, meaning ‘help’, by the Portuguese) — today a forgotten town memorable only for the ruins of three European forts and its temple of Dagbé, the Celestial Python who opened the eyes of Man.

  ONE

  THE FAMILY OF Francisco Manoel da Silva had assembled at Ouidah to honour his memory with a Requiem Mass and dinner. It was the usual suffocating afternoon in March. He had been dead a hundred and seventeen years.

  The Mass was said in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a stuccoed monument to the more severe side of French Catholicism that glared across an expanse of red dirt at the walls, the mud huts and trees of the Python Fetish.

  Turkey buzzards drifted in a milky sky. The metallic din of crickets made the heat seem worse. Banana leaves hung in limp ribbons. There was no wind.

  Father Olimpío da Silva had come into town from the Séminaire de Saint-Gall. A white-haired presence in a crimson cassock, he stood on the south steps, surveying his relatives through steel-rimmed spectacles and swivelling his luminous bronze head with the authority of a gun-turret.

  Not only a priest but an ethnographer by calling, he had attended the lectures of Bergson and Marcel Mauss at the Sorbonne; had published an intricate volume, Les Sacrifices humains chez les Fons, and was unable to begin a sentence without a qualifying adverb: ‘statistiquement . . . morphologiquement . . . ’

  Gravelly organ music floated by; the organist had a limited range of chords.

  The Da Silvas had come from Nigeria, from Togo, from Ghana and even from the Ivory Coast. The poor had come by bus and taxi. The rich were in private cars, and the richest of all, Madame Hélène da Silva, better known as Mama Benz, now sat sprawled over the back seat of her cream-coloured Mercedes, cooling herself with a fan of 10,000-franc notes and waiting for the service to end.

  Everyone in the family knew their ancestor by his Brazilian name, Dom Francisco.

  He came from San Salvador da Bahia in 1812 and, for over thirty years, was the ‘best friend’ of the King of Dahomey, keeping him supplied with rum, tobacco, finery and the Long Dane guns which were made not in Denmark but in Birmingham.

  In return for these favours, he enjoyed the title of Viceroy of Ouidah, a monopoly over the sale of slaves, a cellar of Château Margaux and an inexhaustible seraglio of women. At his death in 1857, he left sixty-three mulatto sons and an unknown quantity of daughters whose ever-darkening progeny, now numberless as grasshoppers, were spread from Luanda to the Latin Quarter. Yet, among those who gathered in the square, only five had travelled to Europe and none to the Americas.

  Turbaned ladies hobbled towards the cathedral, scuffing the dust with feet too splayed and calloused to admit the wearing of shoes. Their cottons were printed with leaves and lions and portraits of military dictators. They hauled themselves into the teak pews.

  Little girls tripped about in frilly dresses: their hair was balkanized into zones, each zone twirled up in a tinselled plait.

  Their brothers wore tight pants and shifted from foot to foot, holding, but not wearing, the red-starred caps of the Jeunes Militants.

  The younger men were in national costume, the old men in suits of white duck or faded khaki.

  The lives of the older Da Silvas were empty and sad. They mourned the Slave Trade as a lost Golden Age when their family was rich, famous and white. They were worn down by rheumatism and the burdens of polygamy. Their skin cracked in the harmattan; then the rains came and tambourined on their caladiums and splashed dados of red mud up the walls of their houses.

  Yet they clung
to their képis and pith-helmets as they clung to the forms of vanished grandeur. They called themselves ‘Brazilians’ though they had lost their Portuguese. People slightly blacker than themselves they called ‘Blacks’. They called Dahomey ‘Dahomey’ long after the Head of State had changed its name to Benin. Each hung Dom Francisco’s picture among their chromolithographs of saints and the Virgin: through him they felt linked to Eternity.

  Father Olimpίo rose before the altar and intoned his annual message in a consoling baritone: the Father-of-Them-All had not died but come to Life Everlasting. He looked down on his Children from his Heavenly Resting Place. He counselled them from the infinite store of his wisdom, ‘especially,’ he added in an undertone, ‘in this, your hour of need’.

  At the Credo, the ladies sighed, heaved their thighs and got to their feet. Letters, lions, leaves and military dictators rustled and recomposed themselves.

  Mrs Rosemary da Silva, the wife of a Lagos accountant, shut her ear to the blasphemies: she was a Methodist. She sat when they kneeled for the Sanctus and she sat through the Agnus Dei. Her husband, Ernest, was beside her, sweating into an English blazer, wishing she hadn’t come. He felt a rush of love and pity for his own kind. She merely did her best to embarrass him.

  She made a show of adjusting her straw boater. She smoothed the folds of her white piqué dress and clacked three ropes of glass beads against her bosom. When the Da Silvas went up to receive the Host, heads bowed in reverence, she looked airily up at the ceiling, wondering how long it would take to fall down.

  The building reeked of decay. Seams of rust were splintering the iron pillars of the aisle. The blue planks of the roof were rotten. Someone had stolen the ivory Dove of Peace inlaid into the altar table. Though the Virgin still beckoned from her niche, her hands were tied in a tangle of cobwebs.

  And there were one or two more conspicuous changes: a Red Star hovered over the Crèche; the faces of the Holy Family had been repainted the colour of Balthazar, and the confessional was full of scarlet drums.

  After the Benediction, the family sang the canticle Mi do gbe we (Salve Regina) in Fon. Father Olimpίo slapped his missal shut and small boys scampered for the sunlight.

  ON THE STEPS of the cathedral the Da Silvas posed for their annual photograph.

  Agostinho-Ezekiel da Silva was in charge of the ritual. A birdlike gentleman of eighty-nine, he was one of the four surviving grandchildren of the Founder, and Head of the Family.

  His skin stretched tight over a bald and shining skull and his toothless mouth was drawn to a perfect O. Silently, he waved instructions with a silver-headed cane: the old people would sit on chairs, the young would stand on the steps and their parents would fill the space between.

  Two spindly boys helped him compose the group. Their names were Modeste and Pierre and they were having a terrible time with the ladies.

  ‘Mettez-vous là, madame!’

  ‘Bougez, madame!’

  ‘Ne bougez pas, madame!’

  But the ladies went on fidgeting, arguing, elbowing and shoving their sisters aside.

  Nor were the men behaving any better.

  Uncle Procopio, a retired flautist of the Dakar Conservatoire, was reciting his ‘Ode to the Death of the Dahomean Republic’. Gustave the intellectual told him to shut up. Africo da Silva was describing his gas station. Karl-Heinrich said that Togolese State Railways ran on time, while old Zéférino, a Kardecist medium, spoke of the planchette conversation he had had with his brother, Colonel Tigré da Silva, in exile on the Champs-Élysées: as usual the colonel had been sipping champagne and eyeing the girls.

  Meanwhile the photographer was getting desperate.

  He was a young man called Cyriaque Cabochichi, with a shaved gourd-like head, skin so black it glinted blue and the most serious approach to his profession. On the back of his sleeveless orange jumpsuit were a purple lamb and letters reading ‘Foto Studio Agnew Pascal’.

  He stood behind his tripod, half-hidden under the black cloth, signalling with both arms to Modeste and Pierre to push the ladies from either end and squeeze them within the frame of his plate camera.

  The boys got wildly excited. They shoved at the ladies’ backsides. They slapped them. They pinched them. But the ladies took no notice: their attention was drawn to the Python Temple where a European tourist was photographing the féticheur. The old man stood on one leg, a blue cloth round his midriff, pulling a face of absolute contempt, with the python’s head nuzzling his left nipple and its tail coiled round his umbilical hernia.

  The sun throbbed and slid downwards, casting bloodred shadows and gilding the jagged edges of the papaya leaves.

  ‘The light’s going,’ moaned Cyriaque Cabochichi, and brought the ladies to their senses.

  Nothing was going to deprive them of their photograph. With a show of unity unimaginable a minute before, they turned sideways into a conga and the length of the line shrank.

  Papa Agostinho set a picture of Dom Francisco on his knees. His chief wife, Yaya Felicidade, tried to control a wayward breast. Gustave tilted his bowler, Procopio twiddled his moustache. Modeste held up the green satin banner of the Société Brésilienne du Carnaval, and the ladies spread their mouths to the camera: flashes of white and gold burst through their lips.

  Overhead the first fruit bats were flying towards the south-east. There was a vague smell of guavas and stale urine. Cyriaque Cabochichi lifted his lens cap and replaced it.

  FROM THE PLACE de l’Immaculée Conception the family set off for the Portuguese Fort.

  Two boys beat a tam-tam. Smaller boys waved maracas, banged gongs, whirled bicycle tyres, and cartwheeled in the dust. Pierre carried a wreath of pink vinyl roses to place on the shrine of the Virgin.

  At the end of the Rue du Monsignor Steinmetz, the procession made a detour round the carcass of a bombax. The Minister of the Interior had declared the tree ‘a sorcerers’ restaurant’ and ordered it to be chopped down after a subaltern of the Gendarmerie caught an old man in the act of nailing a charm to its trunk: the charm had contained a bat claw, some crushed spiders and a newspaper clipping of the President.

  The Da Silvas came into the Place du Marché Zobé. Mountainous mammas were sailing home in the opposite direction. Long-fingered Mandingo traders were folding lengths of indigo into tin trunks. The medicine man wrapped the excrement of a rainbow into a rag, and the state lottery salesman was making his final call to the ‘fidèles amis de la chance’.

  It was the hour when the fetish priests slaughtered a fowl over Aizan, the Market God, an omphalos of cut stone standing alone in an empty space.

  It was also the hour for the intellectuals of Ouidah to gather at the Librairie Moderne and discuss the latest books, even though its stock had been reduced to back numbers of the La Femme soviétique; the Thoughts of Kim Il-Sung; a Socialist novel called Le Baobab; Racine’s Bajazet; a complete Engels and some pots of macaw-coloured brilliantine.

  And it was supper-time. A hundred smoky lamps had lit up the booths where optimistic matrons were ladling millet beer from calabashes, frying fritters in palm-oil, wrapping maize blancmange in banana leaves or grilling joints of agouti, a big rat with yellow teeth.

  Their hands reached out for their customers’ money — pink, moist and affectionate as dog tongues. Babies were tucked into their cottons. All were asleep: not a single baby cried.

  One of the women plucked a wing-feather from a live fowl and twizzled it in her ear.

  ‘It’s to take away the human grease,’ a small boy informed the European tourist: and the tourist, who was collecting this kind of information, patted the boy’s head and gave him a franc.

  ‘I like the Whites,’ the boy purred, ‘because the Whites repair me.’

  Mama Benz went in the Mercedes: she was far too heavy to walk. As the chauffeur drew abreast of the mammas, she stopped for a snack of agouti in sauce, handing out a white enamel bowl to the woman, who handed it back.

  The boy said, ‘Mama Benz is a
carnivore, heh?’

  More little boys, teeth glittering in the half-light, kept up a deafening chorus: ‘Ago! Yovo! Ago! Yovo!’ — which means, ‘Go away, Whitey!’

  Meanwhile the Da Silvas turned right up the Rue Lenine, past the Hotel Windsor, past the Hotel Anti-Windsor and came up to the Bar Ennemi du Soir, where Uncle Procopio slipped in for a drink.

  Nailed to the wall was a rattan mat with three giraffes moving through a Chinese landscape, beside which someone had scrawled in blue chalk:The dog howls

  The caravan goes by

  Two Lagos taxis were parked outside, the Confidence Car and Baby Confidence. Earlier in the afternoon the groans of love were heard from behind the splintering shutters of the bedrooms. But now the drivers were drinking beer with the bar girls and, over the radio, the Head of State was barking the first of his evening monologues.

  The smallest bar girl gasped and bared her armpit in astonishment as Uncle Procopio bowed, clicked his heels and said, ‘Mamzelle, I need a green chartreuse.’ She fixed her eyes on his incredible moustache, poured from the bottle as if by instinct, and held her gaze till he had downed the glass and gone.

  All the young Marxists came out and ogled the Mercedes as it passed.

  The Da Silvas finally reached the Fort and laid the wreath.

  They inspected the Independence Memorial — the last Portuguese Resident’s burned-out Citroën set up on a concrete plinth.

  They looked out over the south bastion at the grey lagoon, at the mangroves and the line of surf beyond.

  The flourish of Arab calligraphy was a canoeman punting home.

  Soft lights were seen moving along the track to the beach, up which Dom Francisco had come, down which the word ‘Voodoo’ made its way to the Americas.