A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  Dolvo did not seem in the least concerned that this was a three-day journey, much of it through very rough country and along roads designed to destroy both life and limb.

  “Okay,” he said. “You have a hotel in Accra for tonight?”

  “I don’t want to stay in Accra,” I told him. “I want to drive to Elmina.”

  Dolvo looked puzzled. “But it is late. You should stay in Accra. We can leave tomorrow morning.”

  “No, I want to get out of Accra tonight because I know what the traffic will be like in the morning,” I explained. “If I’m already in Elmina, it’ll cut several hours out of the drive north.”

  Dolvo nodded. “Okay.” He pointed to the left. “The car is this way.”

  The heat of the airport was nothing compared with the heat outside it, a wall of heat that gave the air a thickness made yet thicker by the exhaust fumes of the waiting taxis and the slightly sweet smell of smoking meats. I had not been on the continent for nearly two years, but once again it struck me that there is nothing like Africa. It greets you at the airport and spills out from there on, a fierce “itselfness” that works like a shredder on the best-laid plans of anyone outside it.

  A blue twilight swam in upon us almost immediately. The sprawling clay-dirt parking lot was unlighted, so that darkness suddenly closed in like a mob. Scores of cars and vans of all description were scattered over the vast undulating terrain, a labyrinth of battered metal, many of the vehicles without doors or windows.

  “Which hotel in Elmina?” Dolvo asked as he pulled himself in behind the wheel of a battered Volvo station wagon.

  “The Oceanside,” I said.

  Dolvo jerked the car into gear. “I know that one,” he said.

  Over the next few hours we made our way out of Accra, passing through its dimly lighted neighborhoods and onto the pocked, half-clay/half-broken-asphalt road that followed the winding coastline to where, in the distance, I finally saw the ghostly white walls of Elmina Castle. By then we’d threaded our way through a continual throng of humanity, most everyone selling an inexplicable sameness of goods—bottled water, wooden bowls, carved figures—heaps of identical wares hawked from roadside stands or carried on vendors’ heads.

  The hotel in Elmina was not unlike the one I’d stayed in twenty years before when I’d spent my one vaguely luxurious night in Rupala. And yet, despite the chaos of the parking lot and the sweltering crawl through the outer reaches of Accra, I found myself thinking not of these hardships, but of Martine, how happy she’d been as a farmer, how at home in Tumasi, the way she’d written about “the pleasure in what others see as lethargy, but which is actually little more than the unhurriedness that comes from our acceptance of a pace that is our own.”

  It was the unhurriedness I’d noticed in Ufala as she swept the small concrete porch outside my door, and in Seso as he folded my laundry, and which I’d seen in the Lutusi as they rested on their haunches, patiently waiting as their herds grazed.

  Surely nothing had more fully confirmed Martine’s claim to be Lubandan, I thought now, than the unhurriedness she’d embraced, and which I’d seen her abandon only once.

  It had been a terrible scene, one I’d observed from my door only a week after I’d penned my report to Bill, then crushed my face into my pillow and, like a little boy denied his heart’s desire, sobbed myself to sleep.

  Gessee had arrived in the village toward the middle of the day, his two uniformed bodyguards at his side, a sure sign that he expected trouble.

  “Miss Aubert,” he said coldly when he reached the stall where Martine had come to buy her weekly supplies.

  Martine turned to him. “’Farmer Gessee,” she said evenly.

  “I was headed to your farm when I saw that you were here in the market,” Gessee said. He reached into the pouch that hung from his shoulder and drew out an envelope that bore the president’s seal. “I have something for you.”

  Martine stared at the envelope, but didn’t take it.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Just read it,” Gessee said with a vaguely gloating look.

  Martine took the envelope, opened it, read it. There was only a hint of surprise in her expression when she looked up from the paper and stared into Gessee’s motionless brown eyes.

  “You’re saying I do not own my farm?” she asked him. “But my father bought this farm when he was a young man. I was born there. It has been in our family for well over fifty years.” She thrust the paper toward Gessee. “You can take this back to Rupala, because it does not apply to me or to my land.”

  Gessee did not move to take the paper from her. “You are a squatter on national land, Miss Aubert,” he told her. “The land you live on belongs to the people of Lubanda. This is an order to vacate the property within one month.”

  “I can read,” Martine said.

  “You read, but you do not understand.”

  “Believe me, I understand.”

  “Then you will vacate?”

  Martine continued to press the paper toward him. “No, I will not,” she said.

  Gessee now took the paper and with exaggerated calm neatly folded it. “Then you are defying the government’s order.”

  “I am not defying anything,” Martine replied. “That order does not apply to me because in Lubanda, occupancy for over fifty years constitutes ownership. That is the law in our country, sir.”

  Gessee’s smile had a note of triumph. “I am well schooled in Lubanda’s laws, Miss Aubert,” he said. “And, yes, occupancy for fifty years does constitute ownership.” The smile broadened with his sense of victory. “But it only applies to native Lubandans.”

  “I am a native Lubandan,” Martine said.

  “No, you are not,” Gessee said. “At least not according to the government’s newly adopted definition of that term.”

  “Newly adopted?” Martine asked.

  “Three days ago,” Gessee said. “On Wednesday at two thirty-five in the afternoon to be exact. The Lubandan Cultural Authentication Act.”

  Gessee’s eyes swept over to me and in their collusive sparkle I saw just how well he had read my little report, and with what speed and ruthlessness they have acted to take from Martine any vestige of power.

  “I have not heard of this new law,” Martine said.

  Gessee shrugged. “That is hardly my responsibility, Miss Aubert.”

  “What does it say?”

  Gessee drew in a long, vaguely weary breath, as if he found it quite tiresome to deal with Martine any longer. “With regard to the matter at hand, it means that fifty years of occupancy confers ownership only to native Lubandans, and by native Lubandans it means ‘culturally native.’” He smiled the smile of one who knew he had, at last, gained the upper hand. “It isn’t just a matter of birth,” he added. “It is a matter of—”

  “Being black,” Martine interrupted.

  “Being of Lubandan cultural origin,” Gessee said. “I think we both know that you do not fit that category, Miss Aubert.”

  For a moment, Martine stared at Gessee from the depths of what seemed a profound sadness. Then, as if the slow fuse of the last few weeks had suddenly reached the powder keg, she drew the paper from Gessee’s hands, lifted it to his face, and ripped it in two.

  “This is nothing but racism,” she said. “And you are a racist.”

  And I thought, No, Martine, no, and rushed toward where they stood, still facing each other. But I was too far away to interfere with what happened next, and probably would have failed in that attempt. A red wave had taken Martine, the pent-up response to those increasingly threatening letters from Rupala, those hideous drawings, and now this transparently racist attempt to take her land.

  “You are also a thief,” she said to Gessee. “You and the other men in Rupala are no different from common burglars because the only thing you work to get—actually work to get—is something that doesn’t belong to you.”

  Gessee’s tone hardened. “You should watch
your mouth, Miss Aubert,” he said. “You are talking about our president.”

  “Our president?” Martine cried. “How is Dasai our president, if I am not Lubandan?”

  Gessee glanced about, clearly aware that the people in the market had gathered around him, and now quite obviously playing to them. “Quite right,” he said with a nod to the crowd. “He is our president, Miss Aubert, not yours.”

  For a moment, Martine held her tongue. She was obviously trying to control herself. But as the seconds passed, the lava heated, slowly but inexorably, then spilled over once again.

  “You and all the rest of you in Rupala,” she said vehemently. “You are like a bad chief, one who lays all the work on his people, mostly the women.”

  “Mostly the women,” Gessee repeated, and glanced meaningfully at the surrounding men.

  “Yes, mostly the women,” Martine said flatly. “Only with you, it is the foreigners you expect to work for you. People in countries thousands of miles away. You expect them to work and pay their taxes so that this money can be given to you.”

  Gessee only watched her silently, like the villagers who had gathered ever more thickly around them. Then he said, “You insult our chiefs, Miss Aubert.” He shook his head as if ashamed for her. “No Lubandan would do that.”

  For a moment he stared at her as if he were sorry for this alien who did not belong, and never would belong, in his country. Then he knelt down, picked up the pieces of the presidential letter, and with a great show of reverence returned them to his pocket.

  “I will report your response to the president,” he said once he’d risen to face Martine once again. With that, he turned and walked away, nodding to the crowd and shaking hands as he made his way to his car.

  Within seconds he was gone, but the tone of the market had changed. A low murmur rippled through it, and I noticed a few hostile glances.

  I had made it to within a few feet of where Martine had exploded, then stopped and waited in the aftershocks of that explosion. For a moment, Martine stood in place, her head unmoving, her eyes very still, breathing slowly, with nothing but the nervous energy of her hands to suggest the gravity of what had just happened.

  “Martine?” I asked, when I finally moved toward her.

  “I should have kept quiet,” she said worriedly as she turned toward me. “I should have just read the letter and kept quiet.”

  More than ever before, she seemed isolated and under siege. She’d thought that being born in Lubanda had assured her acceptance, made her truly Lubandan. But the murmur and the glances told a far different and more perilous story.

  “Let me walk you to the road,” I said.

  She nodded, but said nothing.

  Together we moved through the market, a sea of either hostile or averted eyes. Martine kept her head up and walked at a measured pace, but something had broken in her, and she was in the midst of trying to put it back together again.

  At the road she stopped and turned toward the village. By then, the market had resumed its usual life, and for a moment she gazed at it with a look of dark nostalgia, as if it were something already in the distant past, a backward glimpse in time.

  “I knew they would try to take my farm,” she said softly, as if only to herself. She was silent for a moment before she turned to me and added, “Will you help me keep it, Ray?”

  I’d never expected Martine to ask me to intervene on her behalf, but this was exactly what was being asked, and so my lover’s chest swelled with exhilaration.

  “Of course I will,” I assured her. “I’ll leave for Rupala tonight. I’ll talk to Bill in the morning. He has some influence, I’m sure.”

  She placed the basket on her head, turned and moved up the road a few paces, then stopped suddenly, as if by a thought, and faced me. “Let me know what happens.”

  “Okay,” I said. “And I hope I have good news.”

  “So do I,” Martine said, though it was clear she had no such expectation, so that as she turned and moved away from me again, it struck me that I’d never known a person more helpless than she was now. The big men in Rupala were poised to take her farm. Gessee had provoked her into a reaction that had turned the village—or at least its men—against her. Fareem was visiting his family in the north, leaving her alone at the far end of Tumasi Road.

  For all those dire reasons, and surely as a last resort, she’d been forced to turn to me as her final hope for remaining in Lubanda—me, Ray Campbell, this pathetic, love-struck foreigner whose soul, though drying quickly, had not yet quite turned to dust.

  20

  There is an old, half-comic but somewhat serious maxim among more intrepid travelers: Never trust border guards who are wearing only parts of their uniforms. Had I applied that rule at the Lubandan border, I would have told Dolvo to stop before we reached it, then, as inconspicuously as possible, turned around and returned immediately to Accra. For even in the distance, I could see that one of the guards was wearing a cap at least two sizes too big, while the one who stood beside him was wearing striped uniform pants that fell over his shoes and rested in the dust. My guess was that a larger man, long fattened on bribery, had grown yet more greedy, and as a consequence had died here, these various uniform parts now all that remained of him.

  “Visutu,” Dolvo said as he eyed the border crossing some fifty yards ahead. “You should have a gun.”

  He’d offered to provide me with one shortly before we’d left Accra, but I’d known that it was just something he wanted to sell, and that the price would be ridiculously high.

  “It would be risky, having a gun,” I said now by way of refusing his offer once again.

  Dolvo nodded toward the border. “These ones in the north, they fly the new flag, but they are still Mafumi’s tribe,” he said.

  And indeed this was true. Up ahead, at the little concrete border station, I could see Lubanda’s most recent flag as it waved limply in the sweltering air: against a green and gold background two hands clutching each other in the middle, the skin of the hand at the right growing steadily darker from the wrist, while the other took the opposite direction. As an immediately comprehensible design, it effectively captured Fareem’s much-stated hope of a fully integrated, fully cooperative Lubanda. As a policy, it was certainly less utopian than Village Harmony, but my fear was that it might be no less indicative of Fareem’s peril. If Mafumi’s old guard was still in charge of border stations such as this one, then it was surely possible that some were in Rupala as well, and that they were determined to replace Fareem with a kinsman whose brutality was more to their liking. For after all, though Visutu, Fareem had stood against Mafumi, his own fellow tribesman, and thus must surely be counted a traitor to those who still mourned the loss of their favored tyrant.

  “The new president is trying reconciliation,” I told Dolvo, though at the moment I said it, I imagined Fareem the victim of a plot, soon to be assassinated, or worse. Anything was possible. I knew that after the Janetta Massacre, Mafumi’s men had sliced off the penises of the village’s men and boys and strung them in dangling groups on fishing lines, where they’d hung like the catch of the day. Reconciliation with such men? What policy could be more charged with peril? I had never been convinced that reconciliation, despite the new president’s devotion to it, was not, as he’d put it, “the way out of Hell.” For how are men ever made better by ignoring what they do?

  “They are devils,” Dolvo said. “Even armed it is dangerous in this part of Lubanda.”

  This was true, and for a moment I did honestly revisit my decision to return to this country, as well as my reason for doing so. But just at that instant, a gust of wind suddenly lifted Lubandan’s struggling flag and curled it toward me beckoningly, like a finger. Risk assessment pays no heed to paranormal signs, of course. It doesn’t follow the movements on a Ouija board or derive its information from the tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. And yet, the sudden movement of that flag abruptly stiffened my resolve to help Fareem if I c
ould.

  “Drive on,” I said.

  The man in the oversized cap strolled over to the car as it drew to a halt before a makeshift blockade made of strips of rust-streaked, corrugated tin.

  “Out of the car,” he said.

  We did as we were told, and were escorted into the little concrete shed by the other guard, the one in the long pants. A man in civilian clothes sat behind an old TV tray that had the picture of a young woman drinking from a classic Coca-Cola bottle. Such relics of the fifties could still be found in American bric-a-brac shops, but I’d never seen one in actual use.

  “Name,” the man said.

  We gave our names, but there was no attempt to record them. Rather, the man behind the desk simply stared at us for a moment, then said, “No foreign currency is allowed in Lubanda.”

  This was nonsense, of course. There was no such policy. But extortion at the border was nothing new, and so I understood that dollars would now be “exchanged” for an internationally worthless Lubandan currency according to whatever rate the man behind the Coca-Cola TV tray decided.

  “You have to buy Lubandan money with the money you got,” the man explained. His eyes flitted over to Dolvo. “Him too.”

  “I’m the only one crossing the border,” I told him, firmly, because I’d learned long ago that firmness was something—perhaps the only thing—that all bullies understand. “My driver is going back to Accra.”

  The man smiled. “There is a charge for crossing the border without a driver.”

  Never mind that only a few yards away I could see a steady stream of local people crossing the border on foot, making it clear that this charge applied only to whites. This double standard was also nothing new. At Kinshasa airport, I’d watched luggage handlers riffle through incoming baggage, then sell their contents back to their rightful owners with an unruffled sense of criminal entitlement that would have stunned Al Capone.

  I looked the head of this border station directly in the eye. “Look,” I said flatly, “I know this border station has nothing to do with the government in Rupala. It has nothing to do with border security or immigration, or the control of contraband or anything else. This is a place to rob foreigners, and you are thief, but I don’t care because I need to get into Lubanda. So just stop the bullshit and come up with a fee for you and your friends that will leave me enough money to continue my journey.”