The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  Once convinced, Nana campaigned actively on a love-and-peaceful-accord platform. He vowed that he would postpone his formal coronation until the disgruntled ex-members agreed to return to the club. The elders caucused and voted, and in the end Kwabena Oppong became the third king of the American Ashanti. The next day, he went to the house of the ex-king who had been denied permanent status, talked to him for three hours, pleading tribal loyalty and democratic philosophy, and left satisfied that the ex-king and his partisans would rejoin the club. Eventually, they all did. It was a maneuver so deft that it is still discussed by members of the association. After I heard the story of this negotiation, I asked Nana whether he had any ambitions in the greater political arena.

  “I’m not a politician,” he said.

  “Isn’t this politics?”

  “Oh, no, this is just what a king does—it’s different from politics. It’s for the people, for our culture. I don’t pay much attention to politics. In Ghana, because of the military government, no one wants to think about politics. A lot of Ghanaians left home because of politics.” Then he looked at me and beamed. “I did love campaigning, though,” he said. “I tell you, it was so exciting! When you’re campaigning, you can really express your views and no one gets angry with you.”

  AS NANA OFTEN SAYS, maintaining peace and harmony—in other words, avoiding aggravation—in this world is a job in itself. It also happens to be one that at times seems largely incompatible with his jobs as cabdriver and as king. He puts a great deal of stock in the soothing word and the deep, so-it-goes sigh, but they have on occasion failed him. Last winter, the elders of a new Asanteman Association chapter in Los Angeles asked Nana and a few of his deputies to come out to California for a formal induction ceremony. One cold Sunday evening, members of the New York chapter gathered in the basement of the Calvary United Methodist Church in the South Bronx to discuss the trip, as well as other tribal matters. When I arrived at the church, close to fifty people were inside. About half were in Ashanti traditional dress, and the rest were wearing things like leisure suits, shifts, and slacks. Ten of them were in a corner practicing on the talking drums for an upcoming performance, and ten more were dancing behind a chalkboard. Everyone else was sitting around in groups, chatting in Ashanti or passing out party invitations and announcements. I was given invitations to two outdoorings and one funeral. A stout woman wearing a turban circled the room selling World’s Finest Chocolates for her son’s Boy Scout troop. “Nana’s going to be late,” she told someone. “He had to pick up some of the elders and couldn’t fit them and both loudspeakers in his car.”

  At last, Nana walked in. He was wearing a cinnamon-colored robe over a heavy brown sweater. A line of people formed in front of him before he could sit down. The conversations were all in Ashanti—the association rules require that meetings be conducted in the native language—but I could tell by watching that about ten people were talking to Nana for every one he was able to listen to. Eventually, Nana made his way to a long table in the center of the room and sat down. The chief linguist gave an opening prayer, and a libation of Stolichnaya vodka was poured. Nana began to speak. He first reported on the success of the Christmas dance, then he announced his recommendation that a man who had argued with and insulted an elder and later bumped (maybe intentionally) into a female member of the association be suspended from the club for six months. Then he said how delighted he was about the new Asanteman chapter, and asked the association to pay half of his travel expenses so he could go to California for the induction ceremony. He reminded the members that, as officers of the club, he and the elders received no compensation for their time and expenses, and that the trip was important. “I want to see the new chapter spread its wings,” he said.

  A few people asked questions, and then the group voted to honor Nana’s request. Suddenly, a short man in a red robe, who had the bunchy muscles and thrusting jaw of a boxer, stood up and started talking loudly and with mounting agitation. Nana answered him in a low, reassuring voice. The man grew more upset, and eventually jumped up, shouting and shaking his fist, knocked his chair over, and stomped out of the room. The man’s outburst and the sound of the metal chair crashing down on the floor were so shocking that they seemed to linger in the air. Nana sat for a moment with his head bowed. Then he looked around at his elders and sighed. They sighed back. After a long, quiet interval, Nana looked at the rest of the association members and swept his hands into the air as if he had been ordered to surrender. The gesture had the effect of a starter’s pistol on the stunned members, who immediately broke into excited conversation and laughter. Nana himself eventually began to laugh. “This is the life of a king,” he said to me. “You have to understand that this is the way some people have to be.”

  Since the argument had been conducted in Ashanti, I had understood only the phrases “New York Times,” “Braniff Airlines,” “Atlantic City,” and “five dollars.” I wanted to know the substance of the argument, so a few minutes later I asked Owusu-Manu, who often translated for me, what all the yelling had been about. He looked at me quizzically for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure exactly what yelling I was referring to. Then he nodded slowly and said, “Ohhh, yes,” took a notepad, wrote something on it, and handed it to me. The note said, “A Discussion was going on. The King was beseeching his people.”

  Forbearance of this order is actually at odds with the Ashanti tradition, which in the course of history has generally weighed in on the side of ferocity and belligerence, but Nana says that it is just as well to let some traditions fall by the wayside. “Some of what we do here is real,” he says, “but some of it is just imitation.” One evening after that meeting, he invited me to his house for a gathering of the elders. Nana had wanted to have them describe to me how the association was founded, but within a few minutes the conversation had turned to the subject of the legendary warlike spirit of the Ashanti people. One chief elder, an energetic, gregarious man named Emmanuel Kofi Appiah, who is a child-services caseworker for the city, said, “The Ashanti are fighters, you know. In the olden days, we loved to go to war.”

  “We were the only tribe to defeat the British. We fought them and won many times,” another elder said.

  “We fought them seven times and defeated them five times,” Appiah said.

  “That was the olden days.”

  “Those were good days.”

  “Oh, yes, we loved to go to war.”

  Another elder leaned over and said, “Our symbol is the porcupine. It is the wildest little animal in the bush. It has a skin of spears. If you pull out one of the spears, a thousand will grow in its place.” He sat back and said, “That means if you kill one Ashanti a thousand will spring up to take revenge.”

  Nana hadn’t said anything all this time, but now, looking slightly distressed, he inched forward in his chair and made some portentous throat-clearing noises. “We love our culture,” he said once he had everyone’s attention. “Parts of it have changed, though. We’re not warlike anymore. We also used to have another tradition we don’t follow anymore. It used to be that when the king died his entire entourage was killed, so it could accompany him to Heaven.” The elders looked down sheepishly.

  A gentle temperament was probably Nana’s to begin with, but I have been told that it has even been softened since he became king; if so, this is surely one of the few times when a sensational improvement in a person’s status in life has resulted in an equivalent upswing in his modesty and self-restraint. No one I spoke to could remember Nana ever getting cranky or harsh, or seeing him swagger around. In many months of spending time with him, I only once saw aggravation get the best of him.

  Last winter, the association had been invited to appear at the opening of an exhibition of antique Ashanti goldweights at the Montclair Art Museum. First, the club’s cultural group was going to play the talking drums and do traditional dances in a nearby auditorium, and then Nana and his entourage were expected to attend a cocktail party at
the museum. Montclair is a forty-minute drive from Brooklyn and the Bronx, so Nana had hired a van and driver to take some of the Ashanti to the show. About two hundred people were in the auditorium for the performance, but forty-five minutes after it was supposed to begin the van had not appeared.

  Nana was dressed that day in his most resplendent ntoma, which has gold embroidery on dark gold silk; a gold-beaded royal headband called an abotire; thick gold armbands and rings; and dozens of strands of gold-colored beads. The outfit was splendid, but Nana looked distraught and was pacing around backstage, ignoring the rest of the club members, who were clustered behind the curtain. His daughters, Susie and Mandy, dressed in bright skirts and also draped with gold-colored beads, were across the stage, practicing for the performance of the adowa, an Ashanti dance that involves mincing forward slowly as you sway and scoop the air with your hands.

  “Oh, my! Oh, my!” Nana was muttering. “I get the van, and then it disappears. The queen mother is on that van. I’m down. I’m so down! I’m so down! I am so down!” He suddenly noticed Susie dancing. “Susie, come on!” he scolded. “More action!” He started to dance slowly in front of her, scooping his hands deeply beside his hips, his lips pursed. “More action!” he insisted. Just then, word came that the van, the queen mother, and the rest of the entourage had been spotted in the parking lot. Nana stopped dancing, clasped his hands to his chest, and squeezed his eyes shut. Later, after the performance, I went to the museum and, in the center of the main exhibit room, saw Nana enthroned on a platform, with his children and several elders seated around him. One elder was standing and holding the royal umbrella over Nana’s head. Nana was sitting absolutely still, gazing into the middle distance. He now looked utterly serene and, for a moment, otherworldly. The room was empty except for the Ashanti, and then the partygoers started to wander in, and someone called over her shoulder, “Oh, Bob, look! It’s that king!”

  EARLY LAST SUMMER, I received an invitation to the funeral of Dr. Gabriel Kofi Osei. The funeral, the invitation said, would have ninety chief mourners, twenty-nine special guests, and a service conducted jointly by the Reverend Dr. Kumi Dwamena and the Reverend J. O. Sarfo; at the organ would be Professor Ok Ahoofe. The rites were scheduled to begin at 10:00 P.M. and end, according to the usual Ashanti schedule, at 4:00 A.M. “We always stay up late. That’s just the way it is in Africa,” an Ashanti once explained to me. “We love parties, and no one ever gets to sleep.”

  The funeral was held upstairs in a community hall called Afrika House, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Downstairs, in another public room, a group unrelated to the association was holding some sort of gathering that had ascended to a level of enthusiasm not entirely in keeping with the funeral soon to take place above it. One of the chief concerns of the Asanteman Association, and one of the things Nana had hoped to change when he decided to run for king, is the difficulty of finding a suitable place to conduct Ashanti business. “We don’t have a home of our own, and it’s sad—very sad,” Nana told me once, looking grim. “We want our own home. We could have classes there, and parties, funerals—everything. We would even like a school there for our children, so that they could learn the Ashanti language and culture.” Then he brightened and said, “I think the king could probably have an office there, too.” Earlier in the year, a few members of the association had looked into the possibility of buying an abandoned house from the city, but at the moment the expense was too great.

  Today, the Ashanti still have to rent halls and meeting places catch-as-catch-can. The monthly meetings are usually held in the Calvary Church basement, where libations are poured onto a yellowing linoleum floor and where, because the basement is used most of the time as a day-care center, the king makes his speeches before a backdrop of cotton-ball snowmen, hand-outline turkeys, or crayoned-in flags, depending on the time of year. In his State of the Tribe address, last January, Nana had said to the members, “Yes, it is true that we need to have a place of our own for our meetings and public functions. I did not promise you this when I took office—I did not, because there was no fund in our cupboard. However, it has never, never gone out of my thinking cap.” Afrika House is another frequently used meeting place; everyone had obviously become accustomed to the possibility that something wild would be going on in one room while a solemn tribal rite was going on in another.

  On the evening of the funeral, a rainstorm broke out, and when I arrived I noticed many of the association members running into the building and variously grasping umbrellas, funeral robes, and their invitations. The turnout wasn’t expected to be especially large; the weather was forbidding, and Dr. Osei, a lawyer who had also been a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was not well known, or was known mostly as a quirky man—an iconoclast, a disbeliever in Western medicine (he had resisted nearly all treatment of his final illness, which was lung cancer), and a blazing advocate of African nationalism. He was a committed radical, and was openly political in a mostly moderate and self-contained population. Dr. Osei was not even a member of the association, but the members had agreed to give him a traditional funeral.

  Nana, the queen mother, the elders, and the chief mourners were seated at long banquet tables set up in a large circle. They were all dressed in billowy black and maroon funeral robes. At each person’s place was a small plate holding sugar cubes, pieces of fresh ginger, and mint candies. I was seated next to Ataa Pokuah, a large, exuberant woman with light skin, freckles, and a broad, upturned mouth, who had been the queen mother for three and a half years before Ama Asantewaa was elected. She pushed the plate toward me. “Just like Ghana!” she exclaimed. “These are the traditional funeral foods, bitter and sweet. The only difference is if we were in Ghana there would be doughnuts, too.” I had arrived at midnight, when I thought the funeral would be at its peak, but Ataa Pokuah laughed, and said that it wouldn’t really get under way until one or two in the morning.

  By one o’clock, there were about eighty people in the room. As each person entered, he would shake the hand of every person seated at the table nearest the door and then at each of the others—an Ashanti custom that is collegial and welcoming and at the same time a serious impediment to traffic. At a few minutes past one, the lineup of funeralgoers extended down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. Nana greeted each guest, reaching his right hand out while he pulled his robe back with his left. On occasions like this, he doesn’t speak publicly or direct ritual proceedings; his job is to sit in attendance and give his blessing. He is, in effect, a royal chaperon, and has about him an air of reserve and dignity. The job of chairing events and managing their ebb and flow belongs to Johnson Owusu-Manu, the junior elder who is Nana’s chief spokesman. A chatty, high-spirited man with a pencil mustache and a puff of shiny black hair, who habitually wears a gold-plated Playboy bunny pendant with his tribal clothes, Owusu-Manu is as much of a natural speaker as Nana is a pacifying presence. He is handy with a microphone and has told me again and again that he loves addressing a group. He is a master of matching his style to the mood of a crowd. Over time, I have been exposed to some of the many moods of Owusu-Manu. There is the Catskills tummler: “It’s June, ladies and gentlemen. It rains. It stops. It rains again. You people in traditional clothing are having trouble. I know that. You’re getting wet. You’re having trouble driving. It’s June. Don’t blame me.”

  The hypothesizer: “We can’t go forward with the performance because the spear bearer isn’t here yet. If we were a subway train, I would say we had a red light.”

  The theologian: “The Catholics pray to the saints. The Christians pray to Jesus Christ. The Ashanti pray to their ancestors. We are pouring our libation as an offering to our ancestors. If you want any more information, I would be happy to educate you further in the art of libation pouring.”

  The snake-oil salesman: “May I bring to your attention the videotape of the recent puberty ritual? May I recommend that you order now? I don’t—I really don’t—think you w
ill be sorry. You will be sorry only if you don’t order one or two now.”

  The showbiz emcee: “Ladies and gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen—here he is, the king of the Ashanti!”

  At two in the morning, after the handshaking had gone on for about an hour, Owusu-Manu took the microphone and strolled to the center of the room and announced the pouring of the libation. His mood and speech were dark and serious. Nana watched with his head slightly bowed and his arms stretched out on the table in front of him. After Owusu-Manu spoke, someone turned on an eerie, droning, rhythmic chant record, and a group of ten or twelve mourners clustered together and began dancing in a slow shuffle around the room. As they passed Nana, he extended his right hand and pointed at them with the index and middle finger extended—an African gesture of encouragement. A look of immense sadness crossed his face. The dancers circled the room over and over, pausing in front of Nana as he waved his hand.

  “Look at that,” Ataa Pokuah said, pointing at Nana. “He’s saying he accepts them.” She looked so wistful that I asked her if she missed her position as a tribe chief.