The Viceroy of Ouidah

by Bruce Chatwin

  An albino dwarf jumped up, saluted crazily, screeched white man’s talk and gurgled as if he were being garrotted.

  The executioner ran his fingers up and down his knife-blade.

  But the prisoner knew better than to show fear and, as if by suction, drew the monarch’s mouth into a cracked tobacco-stained smile.

  By the end of the audience he was the King’s friend.

  NOT THAT HE was set free, merely that swarms of people clustered round his house — to see him, to feel him, to beg for medical treatment and give him food. Ministers came to call, princes came. A man came with a tumour the size of a loaf, and a woman kept coming with fruit and said, ‘I am your mother.’

  He found the Portuguese prisoners and noted down their names: ‘Luis Lisboa ... Antonio Pires ... Roque Dias de Jordão ... ’ but when he tried to get them released, the King said, ‘You are my friend. Don’t speak about my enemies.’

  The King said he loved him ‘too much’ and made him stand at his side to watch every ceremony of importance. So, Francisco Manoel saw the Horse Sacrifice and the Platform Sacrifice, at which the victims were trussed in baskets and toppled to the executioners. He saw the spirits of Dead Kings moving with the slow disjointed gait of skeletons. He saw the Dead Queen Mothers, who were much more colourful and lively; the King’s ‘Birds’ who twittered and wore white, and the Lady Pipe Smokers who looked rather ill.

  Often, the King would dance himself, rolling his scapulars and weaving his steps around the skulls of his favourite victims. Or he would amuse himself by teaching little boys to chop heads, and when they made a mess of it shout, ‘Not that way, you fool! Think of chopping wood!’

  Then he would nudge his friend in the ribs and bellow, ‘Ha! Whiteman! I drink from your head also.’

  The courtiers cackled at his buffooneries, and Francisco Manoel wondered where the farce would end.

  YET HE WAS not alone; for there was a young man who kept trailing him wherever he went.

  His forehead was high and wide, his eyebrows were glistening arches and his teeth shone. He wore an iron ring on his upper arm. A pink tunic, slit at the sides, revealed the slabs of his back and chest, and a hunter’s knife hung loosely from his belt.

  His one defect was a cast in the right eye, which was veiled and bloodshot.

  He seemed to be signalling a message, but when Francisco Manoel returned the smile, the face collapsed in idiotic blankness.

  A guard said he was Kankpé, the King’s mad half-brother.

  A friendlier guard whispered that Kankpé was only shamming madness; that he was the rightful king, and only waiting for an omen to raise the rebellion.

  IN APRIL, THE month when purple arums reared their hoods in the yamfields, there were fresh rumours spreading through the city.

  The diviners who foresaw the future in egg-yolks and the surface of water were predicting catastrophe or change. At Sado, a woman gave birth to a boy who was half a leopard. The war against the Egbas had produced a total of five captives — and the King’s behaviour had surpassed even Dahomean limits of tolerance.

  He had tied up his two chief ministers, the Mingan and Meu, and spat rum in their faces. He had castrated a soldier whose hips were too wide. His sons had defiled a royal tomb, and he had opened the belly of one of his wives to prove her foetus was a boy.

  One morning levee, an old man pushed through the crowd and raised a finger at the throne. His cheeks were hollow. His chest was smeared with white paste and white rags hung limply from his hips.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked the King.

  ‘Can you not recognize Adjaholanhoun?’ the man answered. ‘It was I who obeyed your orders to poison your father. Now the Dead Kings have put me in prison for helping your crimes.’

  The King shuddered and called for food for the stranger. But the old man threw the cornpastes over his left shoulder and said, ‘The Dead eat so.’ Then he poured the palm-wine over his right shoulder: ‘The Dead drink so.’

  The crowd parted, he walked into the mist and no one could find a trace of his footfalls.

  All through that month the hyenas came into the streets at night and the city was silent by day. The King had played with his prisoner for a season and now had grown tired of his plaything. And the prisoner looked on death as a face unfolding from a mirror: he let himself hang limp when they dragged him out and threw him on the ground before the throne.

  The King stood over him, his shadow falling in a dark diagonal stripe:

  ‘Why has Portugal sent three hundred and thirty-five ships to attack Ouidah?’

  ‘It hasn’t.’

  ‘Why did you kill my greyhound?’

  He opened his mouth to speak, but the guards stoppered it with a wooden gag.

  ‘So you think you’re a white man?’ the King sneered, and ordered him off to prison.

  THE GUARDS SHAVED his head and dipped him in a vat of indigo.

  To made sure the dye reached every pore, they made him submerge his head and breathe through a straw. They dipped him five times in a single moon, but each time, when they scrubbed him, the skin showed up grey underneath and they put him back to soak.

  Then, since there was no precedent for beheading a white man — and since white was the colour of death and all whites were half-dead anyway — they left him to die without water or shade or food.

  His legs withered. His stomach stretched taut as a drum. His skin erupted in watery pustules: whichever way he turned was agony. Phosphorescent centipedes crawled over him at night; and the vultures spattered him with ammoniac droppings, shuffling for position along the wall, and flexing their pinions with the noise of tearing silk.

  He dreamed of walking through a line of airless rooms and, in each room, seeing his own head, crawling with meatflies, laid out on a silver dish. His fingers would push back the eyelids and a green light would flash and set the flies buzzing till they dropped, ping . . . ping . . . , and exploded in wisps of smoke.

  Sometimes he saw Prince Kankpé, standing full-face as if frescoed on the wall, smiling and showing the gap between his two front teeth.

  Memories of Brazil kept passing before his eyes: the miserable mud house, the pendulum of his dead mother’s leg, the cries of his child, the penitents at Monte Santo, the treasures of the Coutinhos — and as he counted the wrong turnings that had brought him to this end, he choked with self-pity and promised to take the cowl if ever he got out of Africa.

  Or he would shriek with laughter at the absurdity of dying in this charnel-house, where the dead were more alive than the living.

  And when death came, it came quietly, at night. It loosed his chains and lifted him gently up a ladder, up and over the prison wall and laid him on cushions below.

  Kankpé had stolen the wickerwork litter used for carrying cowrie-shells to count the annual census. No one, not even a customs officer, was allowed to look inside. The bearers headed north-west and had crossed the frontier before the alarm went up.

  FRANCISCO MANOEL WOKE from his drugged sleep and let his eyes wander over the chaff-flecked walls of a mud hut. A cock crowed. He heard the burble of women’s laughter and, from over the valley, the trills of a flute.

  A shadow passed across the door, and a grey-haired man came in with a calabash of foaming milk. The foam stuck to his beard; he wiped it with his arm and went back to sleep.

  Later, the same man revealed the identity of his rescuer: he was to wait in the village till Kankpé could join him.

  He went for walks in the sere rolling hills where long-horned cattle were grazing. Far to the west an escarpment crinkled the horizon into facets of purple and blue. The land reminded him of the Sertão, but here the thorn-trees had orange bark and the thorns were long and white and seemed to be shining.

  He woke one morning to hear news that Kankpé was hunting in the bush not far away. He walked with the boy till sunset, till they came to a water-gourd poised by the roots of a tree.

  They heard him before they saw him, striding t
hrough the grass-blades. A freshly killed antelope widened the trapeze of his torso: a breechclout of brown leather merely emphasized his nakedness.

  Kankpé flayed the animal in the half-light, throwing the fat to the dog and burying the entrails so the soul should rest in peace. Then they ate the meat, grilled over a grid of green saplings.

  A leopard barked in the bushes. He crawled to the edge of the clearing and barked back, and for a second they saw the spotted face flickering in the firelight.

  ‘My father,’ he said, and stretched out to sleep.

  For the next five days they went out hunting together, feeling for affinities to break the lines of colour and custom.

  Kankpé showed him the spoor of various antelopes — gazelles, kobs, waterbuck, guibs and bubals. He would steal up on a herd, now running, now crawling, now freezing motionless as an anthill if an animal reared its snout to sniff the wind. He would plunge into a marsh to drive out a wart-hog, or clamber up a tree to keep clear of a buffalo. He never threw his spear unless certain of his target. He despised the hunting gun as the weapon of a coward.

  ON THE FIFTH night they swore a blood pact.

  The moon in its final quarter smeared its light over the lumpy trunk of a baobab. Somewhere a hombill rattled its beak and, not far off, there was a jackal howling.

  The two men knelt facing each other, naked as babies, pressing their thighs together: the pact would be invalid if their genitals touched the ground.

  The moon glinted on the black thighs and biceps, but white skin absorbs the moonlight evenly.

  Kankpé fumbled in a leather bag and took out a skullcup. He set it in the space between their knee-caps and added the ingredients of the sacrament: ashes, beans, baobab pith, a thunderstone, a bullet taken from a corpse, and the powdered head of a horned viper.

  He half-filled the skull with water. Then they split each other’s fingers and watched the black blood fall.

  They drank in turn, running their tongues over the bullet and thunderstone.

  Kankpé rolled his eyes and muttered curses: ‘A dâ la . . . A dâ la . . . ’: blood-brothers live together and together they must die.

  Francisco Manoel drank with the light-heartedness of the man who has skipped from certain death. It took another thirty years for him to realize the extent of his obligations.

  FIVE

  HE MADE HIS way to the coast at Anecho, a slave port to the west of Ouidah in the territory of the Popos. The factory beside the lagoon belonged to a Mr George Lawson, a hunchback mulatto and son of an English captain called George Law. The house was still full of English knick-knacks, but the English ships no longer came and guinea-fowl had nested in the saloon.

  He wanted to get out, to forget, to begin again. He would scan the horizon with Mr Lawson’s telescope, watching for a blur to break into the two half circles of grey, but a ship was a long time coming. In the evenings he played chess, and the stories he told about Abomey distracted his partner from his moves.

  At last, an old felucca flying Portuguese colours dropped anchor and sent a boat ashore. She was bound from Lagos to Bahia but a storm had washed her water-kegs overboard and she needed replacements. The Captain agreed to take him: the crew took him for yet another madman in an African port.

  On his last night ashore, he could not sleep for thinking of Bahia. Already he saw the harbour, and the churches and the grog-shops of the waterfront. But towards daybreak he remembered he would be going back a pauper. He remembered his promise to help Prince Kankpé and, by morning, he was in the mood for revenge.

  His letter to Joaquim Coutinho made light of his sufferings and told the syndicate of their chance to rid Dahomey of a monster and replace him with a candidate of their own.

  THE SYNDICATE REPLIED with a shipment of muskets, rum and tobacco. Teams of porters met Prince Kankpé’s partisans on the frontier. A length of scarlet silk, torn into pennons, became the symbol of the revolt.

  Francisco Manoel waited and went on playing chess: he had just begun a game with Mr Lawson when the new King’s messenger burst into the saloon and blurted out the news.

  Not five days before, the two Chief Ministers had attended the levee, but instead of grovelling and throwing dust on their heads, shouted, ‘The Dead Kings have deposed you!’ and each removed one of the golden sandals that only a King could wear.

  The King winced at his ancestors’ verdict, abdicated and allowed himself to be shut up in prison — where he would linger on another forty years, ordering imaginary executions and slumped in a torpor of compulsive eating.

  Mr Lawson spat out the tamarind pod he had been chewing and said:

  ‘All Dahomeans are liars and new King will be bad king same as old one.’

  Francisco Manoel shuddered at the thought of Abomey and refused to leave with the messenger. More messengers came, offering honours and a monopoly of the Slave Trade. Again he refused.

  Nor would he relent until the evening a black canoe came gliding through the fishweirs and grounded at Lawson’s Landing. A leggy figure stepped ashore. It was Taparica.

  Master and servant flew along the path and smothered each other in an embrace that astonished both of them. They talked all night and, though their talk was unexhausted by the morning, Taparica convinced him he had nothing to fear.

  The bearers brought up his hammock; yet, as he lay down, Francisco Manoel turned to his host and said:

  ‘You’ll see. One day I shall end up his slave.’

  THEY PASSED THROUGH the West Gate of Abomey, riding in an open landau hauled not by horses, but men. A twenty-one gun salvo was fired off. Umbrellas were broken in the crush.

  The new King stood smiling to greet them in a toga of grey silk slashed with silver crescents: around his neck there was a single blue glass bead. He seemed to have grown taller and now trod the earth as if honouring it with his footfalls. He guided them to some chairs, thanked Taparica for ‘landing the Big Fish’, and, without warning, invested Francisco Manoel with the regalia of a Dahomean chief.

  The clamours of the crowd increased in volume: ‘Viva o amigo do Rey.’

  At sunset the King took them to a fortress where, peering from a platform, they saw the deposed monarch, reeling drunkenly round the yard, spitting balls of phlegm into the dust.

  The King said:The hyena howls

  The elephant goes by

  — and from that hour the Dahomeans called Francisco Manoel Adjinakou the Elephant.

  WITHIN A YEAR he was the King’s Viceroy at Ouidah and had turned Dahomey into the most efficient military machine in West Africa.

  As long as he stayed on the coast, he assumed the manners and style of a Brazilian seigneur. From Cape Verde to the Bonny River, drifters of every colour came to feed at his table and test the resources of his cellar. Though the title ‘Dom’ was usually reserved for members of the Portuguese Royal Family, everyone called him ‘Dom Francisco’.

  He gave Ouidah the air of a civilized town by ordering drains to be dug and streets cut through its maze of pestilential alleys. He planted oil palms and coconuts, and introduced the pineapple. The flatlands were a sea of maize and manioc, and there were rice-paddies along the lagoon.

  Because he forbade the lash on his plantations, his own workers adored him. On their way to the fields, they would file past his window and chant his litany: The Elephant spreads his net

  On land and sea

  He buys mothers, fathers, sons

  And the hyena howls in vain

  Friends gather round the smells of his kitchen

  Monkeys dance when they drink palm wine

  He is the Good Sponge who sponges us clean

  He hardens his walls with fire

  He gives us pearls when we give him a mosquito

  In one day he sold all the slaves in Ouidah

  His well will never run dry.

  NO CAPTAIN COULD evade the vigilance of his coastguards. None could load a slave without paying an export tax, or land a bale of cotton without pay
ing him a due. His promissory notes were honoured by bankers in New York or Marseille. Alone or in partnership, he commissioned a fleet of Baltimore clippers.

  These new ships were designed to out-tack any cruiser of the Royal Navy. They had tall raking masts, sleek black hulls, and he named them after seabirds: Fregata, Albatroz, Gaivota, Alcatraz, or Andorinha-do-Mar.

  But they sailed at a sharp angle of keel: even in a moderate sea, the crew had to batten the hatches and close the gratings. The temperature in the hold shot up, and the cargoes died, from heat, from dysentery and lack of air.

  Like every self-respecting slaver, he blamed his losses on the British.

  EACH YEAR, WITH the dry season, he would slough off the habits of civilization and go to war.

  His first task had been to reform the Dahomean army. He and the King got rid of the paunchy, the panicky and the proven drunks. And since Dahomean women were far fiercer fighters than the men — and could recharge a muzzle-loader in half the time — they sent recruiting officers round the villages to enlist the most muscular virgins.

  The recruits were known as the ‘King’s Leopard Wives’.

  They ate raw meat, shaved their heads and filed their teeth to sharp points. They learned to fire from the shoulder not the hip, and never to fire at rustling leaves. On exercises they were made to scale palisades of prickly pear, and they would come back clamouring, ‘Hou! Hou! We are men!’ — and since they were obliged to be celibate, were allowed to slake their lusts on a troop of female prostitutes.

  Dom Francisco insisted on sharing all the hardships of the march.

  He crossed burning savannahs and swam rivers infested with crocodiles. Before an attack on a village, he would lash leaves to his hat and lie motionless till cockcrow. Then, as the dawn silhouetted the roofs like teeth on a sawblade, a whistle would blow, the air fill with raucous cries and, by the end of the morning, the Amazons would be parading before the King, swinging severed heads like dumb-bells.