by Arthur Japin
CLIMATE The temperature is uncommonly hot and moreover exacerbated by the so-called Harmattan and Sammering, two land winds, which are liable to last several weeks on end, and to be accompanied by a diversity of ailments such as fever, paralysis of the limbs and so on. Moreover, the high temperatures in the interior of the land are further raised by proximity to the sands of the Sahara Desert and to the Equator. The latter, however, causes tempering of atmospheric conditions, for although the land is only six degrees north of the Line . . .
In the same manner I gave a survey of the rest of the country, in successive sections bearing such titles as: CONDITIONS OF THE SOIL AND VEGETATION, WATERS, MOUNTAINS AND CAPES. When I reread my own treatise I could imagine it arousing the interest of those who had no knowledge of the country. I gave it to Linse and Lebret to read. They reacted with approval, although their hesitation did not escape me. I knew full well what was missing, and forced myself to rise to the challenge: to tell of such things as only I knew, which were not to be found in books: CHARACTER AND CUSTOMS OF THE PEOPLE.
On 1 March 1847 the premises of the society were decked with garlands. The young men presented themselves in full dress. I was exceptionally nervous. Lebret pointed out that my agitation was out of all proportion, but I did not listen. This would be a turning-point in my life. On that day I felt as though a door had opened which had until then been closed to the likes of me. The fact that I would have to leave my hardheaded cousin behind would not stop me from entering. I was about to show where I stood at last. Concerned about causing offence to my beloved Kwame, I made sure he would not be in the audience. His superiors informed me that he had been assigned to guard duty that evening.
Willem Alexander arrived with Jules van der Capellen almost an hour late, and some tact was necessary to lure the two friends away from the buffet and into the auditorium, but at last, after a brief introduction, I was free to speak as I had intended. I struggled through the courtesies and scientific chapters, and was halfway through my enumeration of agricultural products when I was distracted by the creak of a door being pushed ajar. I looked up, disquieted. I could not make out a face, but for an instant before the door closed again I thought I saw a dark hand on the knob. My voice faltered and I lost my place.
“Plants, silk,” I rambled on, “honey, rice, maize, diverse grains, and sugar cane, although it is unknown to the natives, who employ it for purposes of . . .”
A little cough from Linse, who was sitting in the front row, signalled that I was repeating myself. I skipped half a page to be on the safe side.
“Sweet and sour banana.”
By the time I came to the end of this section there were beads of perspiration on my forehead. I paused and took a sip of water. This was the moment Kwame, not wishing to cause a disturbance, had been waiting for. He gave me a nod and smile of complicity, delighted at having persuaded his commander to grant him leave of absence. Under his arm he carried a gaily wrapped parcel—evidently for me. He slipped into a seat in the fourth row. I mopped my brow and felt my heart sink. But I had to proceed.
“I intend to speak to you about the customs in the land of my birth. First I wish to invoke your forbearance, should you find it tedious to hear the recounting of events and circumstances of a displeasing tenor, in which the deficiencies, way of life, morals, customs etcetera of a rough, uncivilized and little-known people . . .”
I paused again, but did not dare to look up from my notes. For a few moments I thought of stopping there. These thoughts, which I had so painstakingly written down and copied no less than three times over to get them all just right, I had never spoken out loud. At last I summoned the courage to look into the audience. They were spellbound. Kwame, no doubt sensing my disquiet, nodded reassuringly. There was no going back.
“They are heathens! Fetish worshippers. The Ashanti believe in a supreme being, whom they call Jan Kampong, Lord of All That Is. They also believe in good and evil spirits, and in omens. Also objects can have their veneration, such as the magnet or lodestone. Their belief extends, too, to a life after this life, in the sense that he who is king in this life remains king after death, the slave remains a slave, indeed everyone is restored to his own station and occupation in heaven. And it is in this light that one should regard the custom of sacrificing slaves upon the death of a king, priest or other dignitary, in the firm conviction that the deceased will need their services in the afterlife. The same applies to the numerous human sacrifices occasioned by sickness of one or other luminary in the realm, by the afflictions of war, by accession to the throne or anniversaries, by rites for sowing and reaping and other special events. When the chief of a people dies, his throne is dyed black by soaking it in human blood. The death of a lower-ranking headman may require the sacrifice of no more than one or two children. At the time of my father’s investiture as Asantehene, however, the entire population of several villages was designated to follow him into death when he passes away . . .”
Gasps of outrage and shock rose from the audience, just as I had expected. The smile on Kwame’s face had faded. He glanced around him. I could see him biting his lip. Then he fixed me with a steely look. I was not going to give up now.
“An interesting example is the yam feast of odwira. Each year at the beginning of September, when the yams are harvested, all the district chiefs and military leaders are duty-bound to present themselves with their retinues in the capital. While they parade past the king of Ashanti, two groups of one hundred executioners each traverse the city, sowing dread. They advance slowly, beating their chopping knives rhythmically on the skulls of high-placed victims, as a warning of the fate awaiting certain dignitaries before the end of the festival. In order to remove all suspicion of disloyalty to the Asantehene, these dignitaries order slaves to be slaughtered all over the city. This is not to say that any man found lacking in devotion to the powers that be during the past year will escape execution. At the end of the festival, the holes in the fields left by harvesting the yams are filled with the blood of the victims, thus assuring continued fertility.”
Heads were shaken in disbelief, and there was some expostulation.
“You may wonder what induces me to recount the barbarism of a brutish, savage and uncivilized race. What can be the purpose of evoking monstrous acts which in the hearing alone fill us with horror?”
Why did I not hold my tongue? Why did I not spare Kwame’s feelings? All I can say is this: his pained expression spurred me on. Not out of cruelty—God forbid! I had no wish to hurt him; on the contrary, my aim was to ease his pain. Indeed his tears inflamed my desire to declare to him: see, they are not worth pining for. The anguish and loneliness that has been our lot is the doing of my own father, of our own people. What more can I say? Does not the wound in our hearts that will never heal attest to unspeakable cruelty and barbarism? Can there be any justification for the heartless manner in which we were banished from their midst? Why not join my cause? Take my hand and let us turn our backs on this barbarian heritage. Let us disown it. Once and for all.
I must confess that I had phrased my discourse with deliberate stridency in order to convince my fellow students that I had truly put the life of the wild behind me. That from now on I was one of them. But in the face of Kwame’s obvious misery—even if I myself were the instrument of it—my personal objective paled to insignificance. From then on I addressed my words to him alone, and only through him to the others.
I criticized the religion, customs and thinking of my forebears. I censured the state of knowledge, the traditions of kinship and social relations, of love and work, of the divinities both living and dead. One after the other. As though I had to tear the roots out of my own flesh.
“Equal rights obtain between man and woman, including the possibility of seeking divorce. But the man alone enjoys the legal right to punish his wife, notably by cutting off parts of the body: the penalty for adultery is the loss of her nose, for divulging a secret or eavesdropping the loss of both
ears. Women who have been mutilated thus are a common sight in Kumasi.”
I had to pause here. My eyes raced across my papers, but my heart could no longer endure my own words. The audience was silent, staring at me in bewilderment. I shuddered, and turned over several pages in quick succession.
“No,” I said, reading from my notes again, “I do not wish to proceed in this vein, but to stop here after humbly requesting your compassion and forgiveness for your brothers in nature, who in their blind savagery commit such deeds, for these abominations are indeed deemed rightful by them. The people are foolish and deeply superstitious, and from these two deficiencies their priests draw masterful profit, impressing upon the minds of men all manner of alien and unspeakable notions, thus compounding their folly and superstition.”
At this point Kwame jumped to his feet. His chair clattered to the marble floor. He took a few tottering steps and seemed about to fall. Lebret made to catch him, but Kwame had recovered his strength. He drew himself up, threw back his head and opened his mouth. He let out a roar like a wounded animal, like an epileptic. It was dreadful, there was no end to it, and when his breath ran out he doubled up as if he had been punched in the stomach, squeezing out the last air in his lungs, groaning, raving. He foamed at the mouth. Linse took his arm to calm him down, but Kwame threw him off. He ran towards the door, but the soles of his military shoes were slippery and he fell flat on the floor, his sprawled body sliding forward. The students on either side of the aisle shrank back, afraid that he would attack them. Jules van der Capellen unsheathed a short hunting knife, and shielded Willem Alexander, who had turned ghostly pale. But Kwame scrambled to his feet and stormed out without a backward glance, as if he could not breathe until he was down in the street again. Linse wanted to run after him, but was restrained by Lebret, who flashed a knowing look in my direction. It took a while for peace to be restored, although the whispering and shuffling did not abate. It was only when I made to take a sip of water that I noticed that I had gripped my glass so firmly that it had broken. There was a small cut in the palm of my hand.
“Now then,” I said, dabbing the cut with my handkerchief. Having cleared my throat for the last time, I continued until the end of my exposé without faltering even once: “Let us pause for a few moments to cast an eye into the dwelling of a witch doctor . . .”
The last guests left the society at first light. I had no desire to go home. I was drunk. Everyone was drunk. After giving my speech I had sent Linse to the van Moocks to enquire after my cousin. He returned half an hour later saying that Kwame had arrived there with a slight case of food poisoning. Mrs. van Moock had given him milk with calcium and had sent him to bed. He was asleep. All was well. Greatly relieved, I called for the champagne to be uncorked. From then on I immersed myself in the festivities and forgot the disarray.
I was woken by a servant clearing the tables. Another domestic was gathering glasses and shards from the floor. I did not wish to stand in their way and struggled to slip my arms into the sleeves of my coat. The insignia of my newly acquired membership of the Five Columns were in my pocket. I drew them out and, weighing them on my hand, staggered to the door. Halfway there, I steadied myself against the wall hung with the portraits of the honourable members. The servants held me in their sights. I made a pretence of studying the row of faces. My air was grave as I contemplated twenty or thirty young Dutchmen of noble birth. There were painted miniatures, several profile portraits, one figure on horseback, another during a hunt.
Earlier in the evening, when I was solemnly presented with my daguerreotype portrait, I had not inspected it so as not to appear vain, but now I could not wait. I slipped it out of its case. The silvered copper plate glittered like a mirror. I narrowed my eyes. Holding it at a certain angle I could distinguish my own likeness, in the pose I had struck in the studio.
Mercury vapour was applied to create a positive image: a proud-looking young man wearing a silken waistcoat and holding his book with the severity of one who has no time for frivolities. His skin is dark, only a shade lighter than his coal-black morning coat. He has the wide cheekbones of the Ashanti and a short beard bordering his full lips.
For a few seconds I was delighted with the likeness. Then I noticed! Behind the shimmering image lay another. I could hardly believe my eyes.
The slightest tremor of the fingers affected the angle of the light, making the surface flash from jet black to silver white and reversing the areas upon which the mercury vapour had condensed into silver—turning black into white and white into black.
I tilted the plate this way and that: one moment the young man paled, the next he darkened. Before my own eyes I switched from black to white and from white to black, again and again, in a spasm of indecision. The process developed by Monsieur Daguerre, the positive–negative action of the reflecting plate, portrayed reality as well as its antithesis. Life and dream.
I narrowed my bad eye. I snuffed the candle in order to lessen the dazzle. But however hard I tried, both figures kept coming back: Kwasi and Aquasi, black, white, black, white, black, white.
Two young men are thus united within the same image: a white man with a black shadow, and a dark man with a white aura. Two men, each fated to become the other, immortalized in a single portrait. I have been both these men.
PART FOUR
WEST AFRICA 1847–50
31 October 1847
How happy I am to have left Holland! Dear friend, happiness is so unpredictable. To be so far away from you, who were my only mainstay for all those years, my better half, from whom I was inseparable—and yet to be happy. You will not hold this against me, for you saw the state I was in. You knew my deepest desires. You shared them once, although you seem to have forgotten that. You have seen how fate trifled with my misfortune for ten long years. Something had to change. So there is no need to blame yourself. It is true that the estrangement between us in the last few months tipped the scales in favour of my departure. After your speech to the Five Columns Club I found I could no longer live among those who had lured you away from me. Rest assured, it has proved to be a blessing. It moved me to do what I had dreamed of doing all those years. Oh, if only you were here to breathe this air.
This evening our ship dropped anchor off the coast. You will remember how heavy the swell is here, and it was too dark to lower a boat for landing. So I shall have to wait until morning. I cannot sleep. I have not set foot on our land and yet I can scent its proximity. I breathe its aroma. The moist warmth, growing more intense with each nautical mile in the past few weeks, has wrapped itself around me. It is as though the pores of my skin are opening to let it in. As though I can relax at last. I am rocked by the waves. Like a newborn babe I lie at the breast, close my eyes and drink. Blindly. There is an inborn trust. I had forgotten its existence and yet, within a few instants, all is as it once was.
There is no moon tonight. Sometimes I fancy I see a flicker in the distance. Is it a lantern, or is it the glitter of stars in the water?
Although I have little news to report at this point, I shall leave this letter with the captain. Tomorrow the ship’s company will be replaced by the regiment we have come to relieve. They are to take on cargo at Abidjan, after which they will head back to Holland. Van Moock will forward this letter to you at once. With any luck you will read it in six weeks. To think there was a time when I could just turn round and whisper in your ear. So distant, my friend, and yet so close to my heart.
I try to envisage how you are spending this evening. I cannot. I do not know where you are. How are your lodgings? What do you eat? Write and tell me everything as soon as possible! What sort of people have you met? What are the names of your fellow students, your professors? Are they kind to you? Knowing that, by now, you too have left Holland makes things easier for me. For some reason I would hate to think of you staying in your little room in Delft, in the same old surroundings. Some travelling will do you good, I am sure. Even a brief absence from the flat polderl
and will remind you that there is more to the world than Holland. Indeed I have no worries on that score. You too are receiving fresh impressions, seeing new panoramas. You will expand your knowledge, meet people and make friends. And I know of one dear friend with whom you will certainly be reunited. I just hope that it will not pain you to see her happy. It is a comforting thought that she will take your welfare to heart. Give my warmest regards to Sophie, and remember to tell me how she is in your next letter.
A bird from the mainland has alighted on deck. The creature is not at all timid, and I have given it some food. It has white feathers and a yellow comb. The gulls tried to steal its meal, but I chased them away. Now it has crept under my chair. It trusts me.
Tomorrow! Tomorrow! My very dear friend, from now on we will keep our gaze fixed on the future. I am certain of that. The present smiles upon us, and we must let bygones be bygones. I have forgiven fate. That is gracious of me, don’t you agree? But I mean it. You must believe me when I say I am no longer shackled to the past. I have arrived. My past lies before me. Tomorrow I shall set eyes on my future once more.
1 November 1847
How clear my head is. I see everything in clean, clear perspective. I don’t know whether this is thanks to the air or to the light. Or to my soul, which keeps careful stock of everything I observe, albeit with detachment. Like a migrant bird. From a great height I recognize a brittle branch as the blossom of yore. Each rediscovered detail points the way forward, tells me that I must go forward.
Governor van der Eb gave me a warm welcome when I came ashore this morning. He had been advised of my forthcoming arrival by the Ministry. He did not address me by my military rank of corporal, but by my noble title. He served the local wine. Palm wine has a sharp tang, did you know that? My tongue curled at the taste, for the memory was of a velvety drink, like liqueur. Do you remember how we broke the seal on one of the casks in the storeroom behind the women’s quarters, and drank until we fainted? Surely the taste was sweet? Or not? I cannot recall. Memory sweetens.