One Man Dancing

by Patricia Keeney

  The day before the visit, however, Charles panics. All his guilt and fear, his sorrow and sadness, his anger and despair rise up in attack.

  Spears rattle the ravaged masks of everyone he has loved and lost. Dry stalks rasping, dead bones clacking in the wastes of Namanve

  The visit is postponed.

  Some days later, they are back at the Lebanese café. Prof. Don has brought a woman this time.

  “Charles, this is my wife. This is Pat. She is a writer. I told her part of your story.”

  “It is a great pleasure to meet you Mrs. Pat.”

  He is like a tortoise in its shell, she thinks.

  “Just ‘Pat’ is good enough Charles,” Prof. Don says. “And please, I’m just Don.

  “Yes sir,” says Charles,” always concerned with propriety.

  They speak of Charles’ former life, of Uganda, of his theatre.

  Prof. Don also has a new idea for Charles. And Charles is staggered by it. A conference is being planned in Africa sponsored by the theatre encyclopedia he is editing. He wants Charles to attend and speak about Abafumi and Robert Serumaga. Don will try to get him a travel grant and a place on the program.

  Charles is tempted by this opportunity — the first connection with his former life in so long — but he can’t grasp enough of it to convince himself he should get involved. How, after all this time and all these assaults on his past and his pride, can he trust this renewed interest? His own body?

  What do they really want?

  How will they use him and Robert’s memory?

  How can he control things, protect what must be protected?

  He has no right to resurrect what is finally at rest.

  And he is very sceptical about speaking to academics who will analyze and judge and make pronouncements. Who will sentence him all over again — publicly, in the eyes of a whole new generation of theatre professionals — to the punishment he has been living. Rationalize it. Prolong it. Justify it.

  After weeks of indecision, he reluctantly agrees. He will go back. Will attend a theatre conference: four days in Senegal for preliminary meetings and four days in Cameroon. Will give his paper at the University of Yaounde.

  “It’s good that it is not taking place in Kampala,” Charles tells Pat in a phone call. “I couldn’t go back to Uganda yet.”

  Because Don is not at home, he talks freely to Pat of his concerns and fears: of returning to Africa after so many years away, of flying so far by himself in his current state of disrepair.

  “Prof. Don,” he continues nervously, “said that you and he will be going early to set up the meetings. That means I must fly alone.”

  “Maybe we can find someone to travel with you,” she suggests. “Did Don mention to you that our son is also going? He’s a sports journalist. He has arranged to cover some soccer stories on a freelance basis while we’re there. Cameroon is apparently a great soccer country.”

  “Oh yes,” says Charles. “They have one of the best football clubs in Africa.” His mind is now racing.

  “The African Cup is going on in Cameroon then,” adds Charles. “A perfect time to be there. I would like to make the trip with your son and show him African football.”

  A weight lifts. For Charles, there will be a companion, a sports writer who will talk football with him. Not theatre. Take his mind off fear. If the academics are too overbearing, he can escape their authority and see a match.

  So it is settled. He will really go.

  The decision brings warm relief. Chilled by a sense of new forces being unleashed, forces that could save or destroy him. He wonders in what disguises they will come. Is he really going back to face them?

  Home? To Africa?

  8. AFRICA

  JASON, THE YOUNG SPORTS JOURNALIST, is affable and kind. Genuinely interested in Charles. A talker and a drinker, a buddy who enthusiastically embraces the most accessible pleasures. A devotee of the senses, of information in every form. And anything that could be construed as entertainment. A little like Charles on his first trip to Amsterdam when the world was a candy box crammed full.

  They spend the Air Afrique flight to Dakar intensely exchanging views on African football. And women.

  Humidity flaps wetly at them upon arrival. In the customs hall, distracted by electric fans, they take their jackets off as the line moves forward through immigration. Now in a tee shirt, Charles is proud of his red, white, and blue flag, with dollar signs all over it.

  “I bought it for a laugh in a close-out shop. It’s funny, isn’t it?” he asks Jason.

  But his good humour shrivels away the moment they approach the immigration booth. The officers on duty seem provoked. They see an African who has become rich while in America. Surely you will share your wealth a bit, they are thinking as they study this tall black man walking with a cane beside his white friend.

  It takes Charles hours to convince them he is not rich. Jason looks on in total amazement.

  “Welcome to Africa,” says Charles as soon as they are allowed to leave the airport. Eventually, the two weary travellers struggle to Cheik Anta Diop University downtown, wet with sweat. Jason has added a fold-up cap to protect his head from the sun. Packed pockets with huge pads, pens sticking out from every angle and many rolls of film bulking up the rest of him.

  Once settled down in their dorm, they go for a short slow walk. Charles feels calm for the first time, happily joining Jason in his concentrated search for a bar. On the way, they discover a carton of condoms on the ground, inadvertently dropped. They pick up the unopened box and notice that there is a stamp across the top indicating that the expiry date has passed by some six months.

  “You are in the Third World now,” says Charles. “Nothing is wasted. Even if no one will buy them in Europe or Canada, there is always a market for such things in Africa.”

  Jason makes a note for his story.

  Then they have some beers and talk until sleep overwhelms them both. From this point on, they are inseparable. Charles begins to introduce Jason as his brother.

  They meet up with Prof. Don and Mrs. Pat. Still somewhat hesitant around the scholar, Charles is easier in his talk with Don’s writer wife. He loves her smile. Other theatre people and academics drop by to say hello. It has been so long since Charles was active this way — physically and mentally — that he fights back his urge to just cry.

  The next day is official sightseeing. Charles is deeply grateful for this casual time before the meetings begin. A group from the conference gathers for lunch on the beach side of the grandest hotel in Dakar, lazily snacking by a shimmering sea that gurgles around black volcanic rock.

  “I just know nothing else matters when I can look out at that scene,” says Sylvia — an African born and American bred scholar now teaching in Dakar. “It returns me to my childhood.”

  Her talk is like a seductive weave of sun and water. When Charles asks her about her work, she declares simply that she teaches women to write.

  “My mother also has stories to tell,” Charles says. “You should meet my mother. But you would have to come to Uganda.”

  “It would be a pleasure,” she says sincerely.

  How different Sylvia is from Kekinoni. He studies her. Thinks her a monarch butterfly in her voluminous sun dress, tipped with colour at the ends of delicate veined hands. Her painted nails pluck at dangly earrings. She absently touches the tops of her full breasts. She is all secret swelling bounty. Poised somewhere between past and future, there is something sacred for him about this black woman.

  They watch as the bright ocean boils up, white and dangerous, like a pot frothing over fire. “Sand blows into Senegal from the Sahara,” Sylvia tells him. “This humid heat haze is always a sign. Feels like a sauna.”

  For Charles it is the finger of African divinity.

  “But,” she concludes, “as
fast as the wave swirls in, it is over.”

  Huge pelicans flock and swoop, animating the gigantic trees behind them. A quick tropical sun makes every colour quiver across the sky. Charles takes a deep breath.

  That evening, they are all invited to Sylvia’s home. Charles is fascinated by the Frenchness he feels all around him. So different from living under the English at home. Jason wants to know about Senegal’s past as a major slave port. Prof. Don wants to know conference details while Pat studies Charles studying this new place.

  “We Africans are merely different pieces of the same puzzle,” Sylvia says mysteriously. “You know that.”

  Her home is filled with dazzling silver gift-wrap cushions that remind Charles of crêpey Christmas windows in Toronto. Her furniture, though, is soft white leather. African leather. There is an open-air court at the heart of the house with a huge palm tree. They are always outside even when inside. As it should be.

  For Charles, Sylvia is the new African woman, cosmopolitan, vibrant in her traditions, open to ideas, generous and confident. This is what Robert foresaw, Charles realizes. Robert and all of Abafumi. Such wondrous people.

  At the official opening of the Senegalese portion of the conference, the assembly waits for the Minister of Culture to arrive. He is so late that they begin to doze in the comfortable armchairs placed for them under awnings outside the conference hall. Charles hopes that this minister will actually know something about culture, unlike the ignorant flunkies appointed by Amin and so many other world leaders.

  Finally, the charming and knowledgeable minister arrives, apologizes, and speaks gracefully of politics and art. He stays on, in fact, to hear the papers. At various points, he even intervenes to discuss griotic tradition, the theatre of the concert party, the myth of Spider Anansi, and the various fables that so many of the continent’s women playwrights have drawn upon. Charles is impressed. These experts seem to know something.

  Two days later, the minister also leads them on a tour of an “Artisan Village” created by a multi-form artist with significant support from the Senegalese government.

  After an interminable bus ride, the international assembly of scholars wanders straight into a vision. One created by painters and poets, by marble carvers, chipping and scraping at huge raw blocks, by potters at wheels, ironsmiths at a foundry glowing from its belly, by workers of miniature crafts. Charles meanders through elaborately chiselled doors, stands under shell-studded ceilings as though in a sea king’s palace, gazes past abstractions gracefully curled into air by workers of ivory and stone.

  The courtyard reminds Charles of his Indian house in Kampala, all enclosed and decorated space, except that this village looks out to sea, opens its rounded rooms through bougainvillea and oleander onto whispering ocean, rocks its residents in airy hammocks, gently over foam, between walls that roll and dart, that angle and curve with whimsical design, catching every shudder of wind and gleam of wave.

  Later, Charles walks the coarse sand alone. Raking his heels across it. Shedding his old skin, he thinks. Avoiding the jellyfish, each a shard of misty mauve glass tossed up and stranded, hardening and drying.

  Except the ones still straining towards the water. Graceful arcs aching to complete themselves.

  The next day Charles and Jason arrive from their university dorm to a commotion in the lobby of the hotel where Pat and Prof. Don are staying. Pat is upset. Their room has been robbed.

  “It was so strange,” she says, her voice strained. “I couldn’t see what was missing at first. Then I realized my sunglasses and pen were gone. They were not really expensive. Just glittery. ”

  “Anything that looked like gold was taken,” says Prof. Don.

  “Well, they got lucky when they found my wedding ring,” Pat adds sadly.

  “How did they know you were out of the room?” Jason is ever hungry for news.

  “Africa has not changed,” says Charles. “Especially in good hotels that they know are filled with jewellery. You go out. The elevator man sees you. Someone is signalled to. The room is scoured for valuables. You have a right to be angry, Pat.”

  “I think I’m more disappointed than anything.”

  They all traipse disconsolately to the police station with Sylvia. It is no more than a hot tin box, rusting on the outside, paint-chipped inside, with two kitchen chairs, and a scratched desk. Behind this sits a severe young man in full uniform peering through his glasses, slowly reading the prescribed questions he must fill out laboriously in longhand. His stubby pencil races across the page.

  This official is terrified before a group of foreigners, thinks Charles. The officer is peremptory with Sylvia.

  “Here,” she says to him as they leave, handing him twenty U.S. dollars. “And thank you.”

  She winks at Pat.

  In the glare of a hot afternoon, in dusty, downtown Dakar with its clamour, its begging, and its raucous ostentation, she says, “At least the theft is on record. It is good that they know. But of course, nothing further will be done.”

  Charles is impressed by how long academics can sit without a break. He begins to understand why he is a performer. He must put his ideas into action, not pit them against one another in the rarefied air of intellectual inquiry, of debates over “dictionaries” vs. “encyclopedias,” francophone issues vs. anglophone ones.

  More interesting, he feels, are the student performances in the evenings, when he is able to hunker forward in concentration, captivated by music theatre, dance theatre, spoken play performances. With these young artists, he feels at home, remembering what he was, who his real people are.

  Yet they are nothing like Abafumi. Will he say this to them in a few days when the conference moves to Cameroon? When he has his chance to speak?

  The afternoon before they leave, they are taken to the old slave port at Gorée Island, a fifteen-minute ferry ride from downtown Dakar. Gorée. With its horrific holding cells and colonial sandstone buildings. A place of French prosperity built blandly over the slave bones it broke and buried so deep, over the African spirits it exiled.

  Fort Jesus again. Charles burrows down inside himself.

  They plod slowly along the Gorée beach to the main dock. Sharks can still be seen guarding this area. But it is bright this day. Warm and clear.

  “Evil has a history,” he finally says.

  The group is silent. There is talk of African complicity. There is palpable white guilt.

  The return ferry cleaves the sea and they move away. Charles strains his eyes, holding the dark island steady in his vision.

  Remembering such similar moments in Kenya. Remembering Headmaster Hermitage. His daughters.

  Remembering.

  Charles talks easily with his journalist travel mate, Jason. “I’ve seen more of Europe and South America than I have of Africa,” Charles says peering out the plane window on their way to Yaounde, Cameroon’s capital, a thousand miles distant. Their plane will stop three times: in Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast; in Cotonou, in Benin; and finally in Douala, along the Cameroon coast. From there, they will go by bus up-river to Yaounde, several hours to the northeast.

  A dozen scholars from francophone Africa travel with them.

  Prof. Hansel is their Cameroonian host, a Professor of Literature at the University of Yaounde, fluent, like so many Cameroonians, in French, English, and his own tribal language. He is also working with the government as a national cultural advisor.

  He welcomes them all and shepherds everyone onto the bus for Yaounde, some thirty anglophone scholars having now joined them.

  Douala seems an overgrown shanty town of rain-slicked ruts offering bolts of tired cotton and grimy futons. Their bus snorts and snarls like an irritable animal onto Douala’s main highway, heading north. A decrepit rusting hulk of a vehicle, it spews out fumes, and rocks precariously over the rutted road. With no river in sight, they
soon sink into a drowse of green forest and palm trees, broken only by the clacking of crickets, tin roof shacks, and dangling bare bulbs that glare along the wayside.

  “It must be endless, the bush,” says Pat.

  “You can easily get lost,” Charles tells her. “I have.”

  Yaounde, the capital looms. Creeps up on them. Appears from a distance an improvement over Douala. Eventually, they arrive at the Mount Febe Hotel, perched on a mountainside above the city that sprawls steaming white below them.

  Charles remembers royal palaces in the hills. Cooler. Away from the people. Aloof. And he remembers Abafumi’s running track set calmly in the heights above Kampala where they used to race around the university. Robert and the rest of them. Through the gardens of paradise.

  The hotel impresses everyone.

  “Like the Hilton,” Charles murmurs to no one in particular as they wander through the vast lobby past sundecks and restaurants. Laid out in swirls of concrete with balconies and curved wading pools. Striped parasols shade lacy white tables.

  Pennants fluttering everywhere.

  The German and French theatre scholars — European contributors to Prof. Don’s theatre encyclopedia — greet Charles courteously and with interest. They regard him as a true theatre innovator. He is not being rated for charismatic stage presence, or being fawned over by fans with stars in their eyes, as in the days of Abafumi. He is being respectfully consulted. There are things only he can reveal about a company for whose pioneering work he has become the new spokesperson.

  “We must talk soon,” the scholars say.

  He meets an attractive young female director from Nigeria who runs a Children’s Theatre. And dreams of her at night. He meets others who perform social action drama on topics such as birth control. Here is a new African theatre world that believes in itself, that questions and examines and experiments, that interacts with its respective communities to make change. He longs to learn more of it.