Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Bruce had carried the story around with him a long time. As a boy he had read Burton and Skertchley and had memorised the etchings of King Ghezo’s Amazons, bloodthirsty women who carried Winchesters slung across their backs. (“They were mostly elderly and all of them hideous,” wrote Burton. “The officers were decidedly chosen for the size of their bottoms.”) In addition, the fate of his murdered uncle must have quickened an interest in West Africa. Humphrey Chatwin’s seed necklace in his grandmother’s cabinet was strung on that coastline.

  He also picked up isolated bits of information about Dahomey from his friends Brendan and Alison Oxmantown. In November 1965, Bruce had celebrated the Oxmantowns’ departure for Cotonou. Brendan was quick to detect similarities with Papa Doc’s Haiti: at his suggestion, the hotel sequences of The Comedians were filmed in Cotonou’s Hotel de la Plage. Brendan reported to Bruce on an extraordinary colloquium held in 1966, part of a cultural exchange between Ouidah, the old slave town, and Bahia in Brazil, where a great proportion of the slaves had settled. “Do descend if in need of a little French colonial decadence after caravanserai-ing around the Sahara,” he urged Bruce. “It’s kind of different from your normal sphere of converts, convicts and patriarchs and incense in the snow.”

  Bruce arrived in Ouidah in February 1972, after his not terribly successful filming of the nomad market in Niger, and by then the Oxmantowns had departed for Teheran. He peered into the Python Temple. He spent a week “wandering among the peeling ochreous mud walls and clanking armadillo corrugated-iron roofs”. He attended the sacrifice of a cow and behind a wall in the Quartier Brésil he found his story.

  An old black lady showed him into a room containing an ebony four-poster bed. On a table stood a bottle of Gordon’s gin, “half open and a glass of gin poured out in case he woke up”, and in an alcove a plaster statue of St Francis, “the saint of holy wanderers”, guarded a tombstone. The words on the grey marble slab read: FRANCISCO FELIX DE SOUZA.

  “And then the old lady rolled back the bed sheets and you looked through, down – because the mattress was only sort of half there – at the most amazing sight. A mass of blood and feathers and sacrifices . . .”

  De Souza, known as Cha Cha, had died in this bed in 1849 at the age of 95. A painting over the door showed a hook-nosed white man in a red scarf and tasselled cap who resembled Garibaldi. He was called Cha Cha because he was always in a hurry. The old lady was one of his descendants.

  In Ouidah, the dead are not regarded as dead. Their presence is venerated by the sacrifice of living animals. Few today are more venerated than Francisco de Souza. His relatives, all black, still proudly celebrate their white ancestor’s birthday. Every 4 October, more than 200 de Souzas gather from along the coast and congregate in his house for a 48-hour binge. They drink gin, sing songs sprinkled with Portuguese (although the language of the country is French) and shuffle to the beat of square drums, their faces concealed behind carnival masks of pharaohs, lions and cream-skinned princesses. The man who has worn the Viceroy’s sash and tasselled cap since 1995 is Honoré de Souza, called Cha Cha VIII, a cheerful businessman who has the aluminium concession for Togo. For two days, his courtyard fills with the noise of ripping chicken flesh and the smell of singeing feathers.

  The source of the first Cha Cha’s riches and the nature of his commerce – viz. the sale of their own countrymen – does not disturb Francisco de Souza’s descendants. “He had to earn a living,” one of them says. “Slaves were the commodity then. Today it’s rice.” In 1988, the 200th anniversary of de Souza’s supposed arrival in Ouidah, the family’s leader distributed a pamphlet enjoining them to take seriously their responsibility and to promote the prestigious name of the founder. “Wake up! Our ancestors call us! Let us be true to the spirit of Dom Felix, the nobility of his origin, the exemplary life he led, his work.”

  Bruce discovered that de Souza’s origins were not so noble: his mother was a Brazilian Indian and almost all that is known of his father is that he was Portuguese. Nor were de Souza’s life and work exemplary. He was, however, lucky. He profited from a dramatic upturn in the fortunes of the Brazilian tobacco trade. The Portuguese in Brazil refused to smoke tobacco from the lowest leaves of the plant. The merchants around Bahia experimented by dipping the leaves into cane molasses which, besides being reasonably pleasant tasting, also added weight. The sweetened pipe tobacco, known as soca, found an unexpected market in West Africa. The Kings of Dahomey and their families became addicted, preferring soca to all other brands of tobacco – even to the cowrie shells which they used as currency. Pierre Verger, an expert on the slave trade between Brazil and West Africa and the authority on whom Bruce depended, wrote: “le tabac est le produit qu’ils estiment le plus et sans lequel ils ne peuvent vivre.” The Kings had few commodities with which to finance their craving, but they could offer an erratic supply of slaves.

  In 1750, Bahia was sending 15 ships a year to Ouidah. A manifest records 2,000 rolls of the syrupy-smelling tobacco one way, 700 negroes the other – to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations in Bahia and in the gold mines of Minas Gerais. According to Hugh Thomas, slaves from Ouidah were prized by the Portuguese who thought they had “a magic nose for knowing where gold deposits were”. In about 1788 a penniless de Souza disembarked from one of these ships.

  He had come looking for work in the slave factory in Ouidah and had either been hounded out of Brazil for a political crime or deported for forgery. In any event, in Ouidah he prospered. “After staging a palace revolution in which he deposed one king of Dahomey for another,” Bruce wrote in What Am I Doing Here, “he set about reorganising the Dahomean army – with its corps of Amazon warriors – as the most efficient military machine in Africa.” In 1821 King Ghézo, whom he had rescued from prison, gave de Souza the title of Viceroy and with it a virtual monopoly of the slave traffic. But there was one punishing condition: he could never leave Ouidah. “Prince de Joinville, a son of Louis Philippe, came to call and described fantastic displays of opulence – silver services, gaming saloons, billiard saloons – and the chacha himself wandering about distractedly in a dirty kaftan.”

  The spectacle of a black family taking inordinate pride in their descent from a white – or white-ish – slaver was irresistible to Bruce. He sent a photograph of himself sporting a Cha Cha moustache to his parents: “This town, an old slaving port, is one of the most fascinating places I’ve ever been in . . . Fascinating material for a book.”

  Bruce was once more in Ouidah in December 1976, while waiting for the final proofs of In Patagonia. He planned to spend three months in West Africa and Brazil researching a straightforward biography of de Souza. He invited the art dealer John Kasmin to accompany him on the African part of the journey.

  They landed in Cotonou, Yoruba for “mouth of the river of death”, on 21 December. Dahomey was now the Marxist Republic of Benin. A curfew began at 11 p.m. and officials of President Kérékou were suspicious of foreigners unless they were from North Korea, the country’s closest ally. They travelled in constant fear of expulsion.

  They had arrived in a stiff sea wind in the traditional season for warfare and slave collecting. In Porto Novo, they visited the pathetic museum and its retired director, Clement de Cruz. “After many askings we find our chap and enter his house,” Kasmin wrote in his diary. “A room Howard Hodgkin would love, a little round table and four 1940 chairs, and that’s all. What a chat – in semi-intelligible (to me) French from this very opinionated and, I suppose, intellectual savant of culturation, tradition, extended families etc., but he is helpful to Bruce who relishes this stream of vapid profundities.”

  On 23 December, they proceeded to Ouidah, two hours along the coast. Bruce was pleased to find the same guide as he had in 1972, “a young, honey-coloured mulatto with a flat and friendly face, a curly moustache and a set of dazzling teeth”. Sebastian de Souza was a direct descendant of Cha Cha.

  In the garden of the Portuguese fort, sitting beside the last g
overnor’s burnt-out Citroën DS, Bruce and Kasmin consumed “a stylish lunch”: a bottle of William Lawson whisky and a tin of Malassol caviar, a parting gift from the sculptor Anthony Caro. They visited the Python Temple and the compound of the voodoo chief priest, the Hounon Dagbo. “This Dabgo refuses to shake B’s hand,” Kasmin wrote in his diary, “which embarrasses B who, stepping backward, trod on the bare toes of a stout lady joining the party.”

  Bruce and Kasmin walked the red track from the Viceroy’s house, under the yellow berries of the Auction Tree, and three miles through plantations to the sea. At a conservative estimate, two million men and women filed along this route between 1640 to 1870. Canoes rowed them through the choppy shark water to de Souza’s ships. Bruce and Kasmin looked at the straight line of white breakers and absorbed the incredible fact of how the intoxicated rulers of Dahomey bartered their people for Birmingham rifles and roll after roll of tobacco. On every cargo, de Souza took a percentage.

  Christmas Day found Bruce and Kasmin 120 miles north in Abomey, the former royal capital. They explored the low thatched halls of the nondescript palace and imagined the mud walls hung with hooks bearing human heads, “as thick as they can lie one by another”. The kings of Dahomey, practitioners of human as well as of animal sacrifice, hunted their victims in season, like pheasants. The army’s crack troops were the tall soldier-women who fought with a ferocity, according to one witness, A. B. Ellis, “that most resembled the blind rage of beasts”. Skertchley and Burton, whose texts Bruce used for reference, described them as Amazons. Skertchley elaborated in details that Bruce would remember: “Whenever a woman becomes unsexed, either by the force of circumstances or depravity, she invariably exhibits a superlativeness of evil . . . What spectacle is more calculated to inspire horror than a savage and brutal woman in a passion?” The Amazons beheaded their prisoners, out of sight, in the palace compound, where they poured the blood into pools three feet square and set miniature canoes afloat on it. Sometimes they mixed the blood with gold dust and sea-foam and patted it into the walls. “Pretty nasty feeling of blood and slaughter hangs here,” wrote Kasmin, “but, as B says, it is all colour eventually.”

  Forbidden to take photographs, Bruce could not resist sketching the palace’s grisliest attraction: two thrones mounted on human skulls. The taller, five feet high and carved from a kapok tree, belonged to the Viceroy’s pox-scarred patron, King Ghézo. It stood beneath an open black umbrella, bolted into four cracked, nicotine-coloured craniums. Next to it, embellished by two skulls, was the stool belonging to Ghézo’s mother, Princess Agontimé. According to Dahomey tradition, Ghézo’s half-brother Adandozan, whom he usurped, had sold her to Bahia as a slave.

  Their visit concluded in an audience with the present king, in a simple room adjoining the museum. Kasmin describes Ghézo’s grandson as “an ancient gent in many robes and skirts and spectacles”. His throne was a 1930s office chair covered in green leatherette and for the interview a bare-bosomed lady held a decorated umbrella over his head. “We launched into an exchange that most nearly resembled those recorded last century. The king declaiming and telling stories via the interpreter – occasional newcomers crawling in and kissing the floor and rubbing dirt on their foreheads as in olden days. A delight. He was in full control and displaying a clear memory, this grandson of the great Ghézo. The story was of de Souza, the first Cha Cha, and his search for Ghézo’s mother who had been sold into slavery. B was most turned on and saw his book quickening.”

  Bruce wrote: “A man came in and kissed the concrete floor. The King went on with the story. He came to the end and we paid a thousand francs. He told another story and we paid a little less. He could go on all day. He liked telling stories. He liked getting paid for them. There was not much left for a king to do.”

  Upon payment, King Sagbadjou, who claimed to have been born the year of Richard Burton’s visit in 1863, told Bruce what he knew of the Brazilian. “He was a tall man,” he said, “bigger than the two of you together. My grandfather lifted him over the prison wall. My grandfather, you see, was even bigger than de Souza.”

  Ghézo’s half brother King Adandozan had incarcerated de Souza after an argument, dunking him periodically in vats of indigo to dye his fair skin. Ghézo, hating the man who had sold his mother into captivity, discerned in de Souza a useful ally. Once he had lifted him over the wall they made a blood pact. Years later, de Souza repaid the favour. He earned his title of Viceroy after rescuing Ghézo from prison.

  “The story is wonderful, already forming in my mind, but I’ve hardly touched on it yet,” Bruce wrote to Elizabeth. “I think it will have to be written in the high style of Salammbô.” He extended his usual invitation. “If you liked and could afford it you could come out in Feb for 3 weeks – fare to Cotonou 320. I will have lodging in Pto Novo hopefully, but it is hot and sticky and I’ll be working. x x x B.”

  For another fortnight, Bruce toured the north. He and Kasmin visited a game park and entered Togo where a barman asked: “Êtes-vous aventuriers?” Kasmin wrote: “B. is delighted.” Bruce, meanwhile, wrote to Elizabeth that travelling with Kasmin was “quite exhausting, because one could never tell when he would begin one of his British sense-of-fair-play outbursts.” In Ouidah, they were allowed to witness a ceremony for the initiation of novices. The God of War was paraded, according to Kasmin, “on the shoulders of a boss-eyed tough who looked like Dudley Moore”. Without warning, state officials rushed in, interrupted the dance, and took Bruce and Kasmin angrily aside. It was forbidden to photograph such events: they must hand over the film, or go to the police. “The dance continued, but B and the chief priest defended our position & after a nervous period of noisy discussion we were allowed to leave & with the film too. We got out of town fast. Who had forgotten to tell us that photography is not allowed in Benin without a permit from the Tourist Bureau? I was v. indignant, but B oiled the people as he always does. Were I alone I would have been arrested many times.”

  On 7 January Kasmin flew home to London. Bruce told Elizabeth: “One or two near scrapes, but he was an excellent fellow traveller and we both enjoyed our little tour.” Kasmin was nevertheless aware that he had left behind a companion who was “quite disconsolate” about what form his book would take.

  The original plan, to write a biography of Felix de Souza, was floundering in the poverty of documentary material. In Benin, no archives survived for the de Souzas. The last Portuguese governor, in 1961, had burned down the fort in Ouidah, destroying all records since 1725. In a bid to delve more history out of the slaving families, Bruce crossed the border into Nigeria.

  He spent a week in Ibadan, staying with Keith Nicholson Price, a friend of Gerald Brenan. Bruce arrived out of the harmattan covered in a fine, white powder and looking prematurely grey. He wore jeans, a multi-pocketed jacket and carried a large leather shoulder bag, producing from it a two-year-old letter of introduction.

  Price is one of several who wanted to hold on to the experience of meeting Bruce, to fix it in their journal. Afterwards he wrote a record of Bruce’s visit. He described a character who bustled with energy: “his self-discipline, his inner tension and sense of hurry, his insensitivity and selfishness . . . were a kind of blinkering in his reactions to the outside world. He had work to do and perhaps he knew instinctively he would have very little time in which to do it.”

  After dinner on the second night, they talked about writing. “His first book In Patagonia was about to be published and he felt extremely sensitive about it. He doubted the confidence that his publishers had shown in him. Also Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express had just been published and was selling well. Bruce greatly admired the work and considered it ‘a truly brilliant book . . . I’m sure its success will affect my sales and if that happens any future books of mine will be affected and so will my income and my only real loves, travelling and writing’.”

  Next morning Bruce was up and away before seven, having instructed Price’s steward to prepa
re an early breakfast. He returned late. With every day Price noticed a growing reticence “which seemed to come from fatigue and an increasing frustration”.

  Bruce had pinned much on a meeting with Pierre Verger, then teaching at Ibadan. Verger was typical of the experts whose insights he commandeered. Bruce did not so much appropriate their work as popularise it. He knew how to repackage the esoteric, make it palatable for a broad market. Like Bob Brain in the cave at Swartkrans, or Mateo Martinic in Patagonia, or Theodor Strehlow later in Australia, Verger had devoted 20 or 30 years of investigation to his subject when Bruce appeared out of the blue, bubbling over with contagious enthusiasm, trying to find out everything he knew. “Bruce always went straight to the fountain-head,” says Paddy Leigh Fermor. “He found the best authority he could and asked hundreds of questions and then he would come back the second best informed man on that particular subject in the world possibly.”

  Verger had been working on the cultural links between Bahia and Africa since 1946. His exhaustively researched Flux et Reflux de la traite des Nègres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos, du XVII au XIX siècle was Bruce’s primary source on de Souza.