The Hôtel de Ville has a terrace; on this the notables were seated and here the Presidents, in due course, would watch the charge of the chiefs and their retinues, a charge up the main street, with a salute to the Presidents as the mounted men thundered by. Too early for that; no Presidents in sight, but at the edge of the street there were dancing groups and semicircles of spectators. One group was depicting hunters; the men were old, heavily clad, with monkey tails sewed to the back of their clothes. They circled in a crouch and sprang; again and again. Another set wore beards of monkey fur and made jerking movements of their heads, while three boys stood alongside holding folded black umbrellas. No idea what that was about.
Far down in the town, away from the grand people on the Hôtel de Ville terrace, there was a real dance. The dancers were young Kirdis, young men and girls. The girls wore little white woven aprons, size of pocket handkerchiefs, as cache-sexe, and strips of leather between their legs; the boys wore ragged homemade shorts. There were no drums. Suddenly, the boys would leap into a circle; they made a sound which at first I thought was the copy of a barking dog, but then decided was the sound (their very own) of a man panting in the act of love. They slapped their bent left arms hard against their sides; this was the music; it was also the sound of two bodies striking each other in a fiercer kind of sex than we know. They leapt, jumped, panted—barked, bucked, slapped their arms against their sides. Then a girl attached herself to one man, behind him, touching his shoulder with her hand and swaying her body, or danced in front of him. The girls’ dance was thrusting sexual motions of the pelvis, and gestures of the hands showing how the belly will swell with child. They were very handsome blacks, and their dance was a most direct sexual statement. It was exciting to watch, and I began to imagine what the three months’ drinking and dancing and fornicating orgies of the Kirdis must be like.
Time for the horsemen. These people, who had been travelling for days to get here, had been stuck in the sun for two days—first to practise, then to receive the Presidents—and ignored for their pains, made their final gesture towards the great men, and neither President was there on the terrace. Each chief, at the head of his own band, galloped his horse at top speed up the cement of the main street, lance on high, dipped it to the absent Presidents, swerved his horse and galloped off to the side of the Hôtel de Ville until he could rein in. They rode as though joined to the horse, and they rode very fast, and were an imposing sight.
The local authorities however, in what I now regard as par-for-the-course lack of foresight, had allowed cars to be parked where the horsemen were to pass, alongside the Hôtel de Ville. No one told the horsemen. I watched the first wave, at full gallop, come straight on to the backs of the parked limousines; and held my breath; they managed to pull their horses up standing. No one moved the cars; the horsemen had to adapt themselves. Evidently here, as everywhere, the city slickers rule and win; the country boys get the dirty end of the stick. The country boys are the ones for me, though; they look terrific and their own men. The others, who have a thin patina of western civilization, set my teeth on edge; they are like a conceited but untalented amateur theatrical company, putting on a stupid play in the mistaken impression that they’ve got the lines and gestures right, just like the whites.
Tonight there is a reception for President Tubman at the house of the French Resident. I don’t understand what the role of the French civil servants is, now; as advisers? Anyhow, that house would obviously be the grand place, so there the party is to be. The R. and W. King (or “Le Keeng” as called throughout Cameroun) manager tried to get me invited; he was tactful, not mentioning the subject again when he could not swing it. I am too insignificant. It is another angle; not the Quiet American, not the Ugly American: the Unknown American. I found this pleasing and took my weary bones to bed; but the tam-tams (drums) beat all night; and I waked to the same music. The horsemen were passing my bucaroo again, for the last time, on their way home to the bush.
February 4: President Tubman’s visit brought many strangers to town and two days ago at the hotel bar I saw two French women who filled me with shame for my sex. They looked more slovenly and old than their age, which I’d put in the early 40s. They were drunk on bar stools, one with her hair falling down, one with gluey eyes; a horrid sight. I steered clear of these ladies until this morning, when my transport to the Pitoa market—some ten kilometres out of town—failed. They were going in a Landrover with a Cameroun official, and offered me a ride. I learned that the drunkenness was an error and due, they said, to their inexperience of booze. But what a queer pair, even sober.
One of the ladies is an old Cameroun hand; she introduced herself as “ethnologue, sociologue et avocat.” She is a compulsive talker and braggart, without a shred of humour or self-consciousness, and she evidently knows a great deal about the blacks and this country. She wore very short aquamarine shorts, a blouse with lace, and canvas leggings over sneakers. She has the sloppily pinned-up unwashed hair that only a certain kind of French concierge would be caught dead with. Her chum is a peroxide blonde, pale, with glaucous eyes, a simpering manner, but restfully clad in a dress. The blonde sat in front with the driver and our host, her arm along the seat back, her head too close to the African official, whispering. The word “avid” might safely be used, as description. The ethnologist etc. said her friend had lost her job after seven months and now she was waiting. For what? A black protector?
On Sunday the tribes from all around walk to Pitoa market; it is a big market and richer than any other native market I have seen. The things on sale—specially repellent fish, vegetables, salt, cloth, cattle—were not interesting; the people were.
The Bororo are a nomadic tribe, herdsmen, and the handsomest yet encountered. The women wear sarongs and are extremely thin and narrow-bodied, with fine bony faces like ancient Egyptian sculpture or like beautiful Jews. (But then Akhenaton the Great looks exactly like a Jew.) They are copiously tattooed on the face; they have wide eyes. Their hair is dressed in the most complicated way, braided with coloured wool, yarn, and somehow laced around their heads. Their men are very tall, also with these wonderful Semitic faces, wearing embroidered caps, robes and swords.
The Fali are a Kirdi tribe (i.e. naked pagans) and the women wear a fringed leather cache-sexe, bands of something that looks uncomfortably like horsehair between their legs, ending in a brush behind, like a chopped-off tail. Their jewelry is the most painful to date: silver buttons on the outside of the nostrils, a large (silver dollar size) round stone ornament, like dull mother of pearl, set into and jutting out the lower lip, and holes all around their ears for silver rings. They dress their hair in braids with oiled red earth, so that they seem to be growing dozens of pieces of dark red macaroni or little sausages.
We wandered among these people and the ethnologue pointed, discussed, lectured, with lofty condescension. I felt miserably embarrassed by this arrogant performance. She told me that the black women know herbs to use for abortions, and do so constantly. She said that once, in the bush, she had been ill and taken native medicines and thought she would die of it; she concluded that their intestinal arrangements are quite different from ours. I wondered whether the locals hadn’t tried to poison her.
Meantime the Fulbé women moved gracefully around the place, covered in their elegant pagnes (does clothing induce grace; the naked women have none). The Fulbés are on the whole the most attractive, and have the most lovely eyes. Their language—the language of the conquerors—is the nearest to a lingua franca in this tribe-divided land.
At the edge of the market were the barbers. The barber squats on his heels, the customer squats opposite him. And then, with a sure hand and a razor-edged knife, he shaves the inside of the customer’s nostrils. A terrifying feat.
I caught the plane at lunchtime for Fort Lamy in Chad. By local standards, Fort Lamy is a big city and I was looking forward to a clean room and, by God’s will, air conditioning. I also had romantic dreams about Chad, th
ough all I knew about it was its name which appealed to me from childhood. It was boiling hot, even in the plane, and for half an hour before reaching Fort Lamy we flew over poison green swamp. Horrible country. In this swamp there were small islands with a clump of trees; then the endless scum and craters in the scum. I began to feel depressed about Chad.
There is one good hotel, the Chari, on the river of that name, which bounds the town—a wide stream in a flat land. This hotel was full. I went to the Grand Hotel, in town, and suffered complete despair. The squalor is even greater than in Garua, and here there are mosquitoes to boot. The dirty dark little room stinks of DDT and is littered with mosquito corpses. One dares not open a drawer or a cupboard, to see the relics of the other guests. There is one toilet for the whole hotel. The hotel keepers themselves are like something out of a bad play about Africa; a poor obese young man with open sores on his face and arms, and dirty clothes, a sluttish dark woman. It is appalling.
I went to the bar to take to drink (but they had nothing that one could swallow except beer) and there my acquaintance was made by an elderly muscular Frenchman who began to attack me, as an American. It was the fault of America that all these black countries demanded and got their independence; France had brought civilization, France should fight to keep her colonies and etc. etc. I asked him if he was a member of the OAS, said that I hadn’t seen enough civilization to sneeze at, noble talk tired me, I thought whites were fools ever to have come to these god-awful places in the first place and if they stayed it was obviously to make money and not spread civilization which no one wanted or could use, and though normally I disagreed with my country’s politics, on principle, if we really were responsible for getting the blacks’ independence, which I doubted, we were on the right track. Also considering what a waste of life and money Algeria had been, it was demented to suggest more fighting for people who didn’t want you. The French had better be chummy with the blacks and go on making money, if anyone could in these unbearable places. With that I flounced off to the U.S. Embassy, hoping to find some mail—I had given the Embassy as my forwarding address, knowing no other—and hoping someone would ask me to stay the night so I could get out of that ghastly hotel.
There was mail but no warm-hearted invitations to come on home. The famous American talent for hospitality, as I have noted often before, is lacking in the U.S. Foreign Service; but I suppose that’s self-preservation. And the other thing is: whites do not cluster round newcomers, with smiling welcomes, in Africa. They keep themselves to themselves, much more carefully than in New York or London. Rarity has no special value in these parts.
I roamed, ate a foul meal somewhere, and came back to that despairful hotel room when I was too tired to care any more.
February 5: The horrors of the Grand Hotel exchanged for the horrors of the Parc Hotel. Cigarette butts in the corners of the room, the last tenant’s sheets, a filthy bathroom with a cracked cement floor; but a toilet of one’s own. Sartre should have seen these places so as to get the stage set absolutely right for his hotel room in hell. The privilege of residing in these sewers costs $12.50 a day; two inedible courses for lunch cost $4.40. It is no wonder that people find it strange not to say suspicious that I am travelling in Africa for pleasure.
Added to which, these hotels are in the centre of town, and with their small shuttered windows the rooms might as well be on the airshaft of a Times Square hotel. Not that there is any view in Fort Lamy; it is perfectly flat and suburban. The place name is full of romance; the place looks like an ill-kempt “garden city.” Straight streets run to roundabouts, whence diagonal streets cut off—there must have been a plan at some time. There are trees and flowers and grass and it is cooler than in the northern Cameroun; but dull. The shopping street is short, with offices, shops, and the U.S. Information Service reading room, in one-storey buildings.
Outside the Grand Hotel, the natives display their tourist wares on the pavement; the beasts of the bush carved in wood; some well done, some badly done, but all done alike—yet this is not factory work, and the same design for every antelope, every elephant, is proof of a wanting imagination in the craftsmen. However, this is the first time I have seen any handicrafts for sale; there are also daggers and baskets and ugly brass work. The pavement merchants have a curious notion of business: they expect bargaining but when there are no tourists and no sales, the prices rise—the idea being that you have to make more money when you sell less.
I returned to the U.S. Embassy; proof of being at the end of my rope. I am not an Embassy-category traveller and do not expect help from our embassies or consulates. We have an Ambassador in Chad, because we are a rich and foolish nation. The work could be done by a Consul and a stenographer, and they would have time on their hands. An Ambassador immediately brings into operation Parkinson’s Law; he needs a staff commensurate with his rank. The Ambassador was away on a hunting trip, and the staff was turning over papers; Parkinson’s Law demands that people make work for each other. They have a visitor’s book with four names in it, to which I added mine.
By luck, the First Secretary knew someone in my family. Owing to this personal (not duty-to-the-public) bond, I was quite well received and asked to lunch the next day. My object is to get out of Fort Lamy and see Chad but this is a grand undertaking. There are practically no roads in a country which is three and a half times the size of France, and mostly desert. Due to this year’s floods, the few roads are mainly impassable. Further, there are almost no cars to hire and those will not be rented for travel on the roads, which ruins them. (Only for use in the town and environs.) It is impossible to get to Lake Chad, a body of water larger than Lake Michigan when the rains swell it, otherwise a swampy mass, with approach only by river boat. River boats are not passenger boats, but trading vessels; they go when they go, and plod around the lake villages for a couple of weeks; rather be shot than stay here a couple of weeks.
The French military are in control of whatever the independent Chadian government does not control, and control seems the order of the day. The French have an Army and Airforce Commandant here, and their combined permission is needed to go to the Tibesti, the strange country on the northeastern frontier adjoining the Sudan. The Tibesti is desert, with curious rock formations, and oases, and is alleged to be fascinating. The only other place to go is south, to Fort Archambault, where there is reputed to be much game and the biggest elephants in the world. Planes fly about once a week to each of these areas.
I spent the morning with the U.S. cultural attaché (I think he is that), a very nice man, half black, who no doubt was selected for this job to prove to African blacks that all men are equal in the U.S. Mr X. has about as much relation to the Chadian blacks as I have to Einstein. He speaks careful correct French, and is courtesy itself, and patient; hand in hand, we went to the Chad Ministry of Information, since one must check in here as in a dictatorship or country at war. (More and more convinced that the whole place operates on Parkinson’s Law.) There we met a nervous thin young black, second in command, who was doing his best to run a Ministry of Information, according to notions received from whites or from reading, when there is no information to give and no one to ask for it. He was cordial, upon being told that I was “a distinguished American writer,” and suggested a dinner party for me on my return to Fort Lamy from wherever I was going.
We moved on to the Mayor, whose permission was needed to go to the Tibesti. His Honour was large, cross, and not up to his job. A small, infinitely discreet Frenchman stood at his elbow, while His Honour was unable to make head or tail of my passport, my wishes, or what he was meant to do about it. Still with great tact, the Frenchman got us out to his office, a hole in the wall, and did the necessary writing on my passport. I wonder whether His Honour can read or write? Out of a population of three million, there are three Chadian university graduates, none of whom live in Chad.
The futile and dreary day wore on. I was sitting in the patio (at least shady) of my loathsome hot
el when a young American came to call. This youth is aged twenty-two and on loan from a midwestern university to help the Chadians with their mobile film unit, the said truck and camera equipment being a U.S. gift. He’s nice, if as unfinished as the foetus in the womb, and has a general right idea; he lives in the native section of town, with an “Arab” family—i.e. a black family of the same general race as the Fulbé, distant Arabic descent and the Moslem religion—he speaks the local Arabic dialect and perfect French. He’s adventurous, and untroubled (lucky chap) by any need for hygiene.
We talked French literature to my headaching disbelief; I doubt if I’ve had such a conversation since college but then he is just out of college. We also talked about Life; a subject of which I am increasingly unsure with every year. We agreed to go south together; he knows an odd couple at Fort Archambault who run a hotel, which he describes with enthusiastic romanticism—there we would surely find transport to get to the big game country.
I wrote letters until 1 a.m., again seeking the fatigue which would blot out the filth of my surroundings; and watched my ankles swelling, and with weary dismay realized that I was getting ready for another bout of ptomaine or whatever it is.
February 6: Up at 6 a.m. in the fresh grey morning. As soon as possible (offices open at 7 a.m.) I went off with our First Secretary to call on the French Army. We visited the Infantry Colonel, who saw no reason for me not to go to the Tibesti (and equally no reason for me to go); and proceeded to the air base, to get the okay of the Airforce Commandant, Colonel Bienaimé, and to learn when an army plane was going and if I could have a place on it.
Travels with Myself and Another Page 19