by Tony D'Souza
“Adama,” Abou said, his thin wrists lank over his knees, “you’ve labored well in your fields today. You cleared many weeds with your machete, isn’t it? You’ve cleared back brush and told the forest that you are a man.”
I didn’t like his tone, guessed he was mocking me as the children often did. Beyond us in the witch doctor’s courtyard, women were pounding dried cassava to powder in their wide mortars for the evening toh. I said, “How do you know what sort of work I did today, or if I did it well? Did you skip school again, Abou? Were you in the bushes watching me like a genie?”
“A genie, Adama? No. You are sharpening your machete. Why would you sharpen your machete if it wasn’t dull? Adama, why do you work so often in the fields? What is it that you’ve come here to do?”
It was a question they’d all begun to ask. No matter how often I’d explain 9/11, that money wasn’t available to do my job the way it had been in years past, this never seemed to get through to them. “I’m here to help the village have clean drinking water,” I told him, my patent response. Lately, it had begun to sound lame even to me.
“Ah, Adama, that is good. So you are growing clean water in your fields. That is why you go to them every day.”
“Of course I’m not growing water in my fields, Abou.”
“Eh? So why do you work in the fields if it is not to grow clean water? Clean water is a thing we need very badly. The water my mother brings from the swamp has bugs in it.”
“Times are tough, tough all over the world,” I said, and looked down at my hands, humbled again at my inability to accomplish there what I’d promised when I’d arrived. “Once there was money to do many things. But now my country is at war, and there isn’t. Without money, I can’t do anything. Now I wait.”
“You mean you don’t have a money machine in your hut?”
“A money machine, Abou?”
“A money machine, Adama. All Africans know that whites have machines to make money. That is why whites are rich while blacks are poor. You have machines to fly in the air, machines to fly to the moon, machines to grow food. Therefore, you must also have machines to make money.”
I smiled to myself, raked the file quickly over the blade pinned upright between my bare feet. “We have machines to do almost everything. But we don’t have machines to make money. Believe me, if I had a machine to make money, that’s what I’d spend my days doing. I’d work that machine so hard, we’d all be rich.”
“Also, white babies are born with gold teeth. When the teeth fall out, you collect and sell them, and that is also why you whites are rich.”
“Who told you that?”
Abou shrugged, looked at me with a serious face. “White babies can walk just after they are born.”
“Anything else?”
“White eyes can see into a black man’s soul.”
I shook my head, looked across the village as the drape of evening settled onto it. Women and girls stood upright, lifting and dropping their long pestles like derricks, men and boys in their field rags sat at the fires and looked at nothing. Why argue? I’d once tried to explain what a microwave oven was to Mamadou, came away from that discussion wondering myself if the guiding science behind microwaves wasn’t magic. “It’s a box. You put the food into it. You press a button, it makes a sound, and then the food comes out hot.”
“No fire, Adama?”
“No fire, Mamadou.”
“Then how? Like magic?”
“Not like magic. Like science.”
“Like science how, Adama? How can a simple box make food hot without some magic involved?”
“It’s not just a simple box,” I’d said, shook my head. I didn’t for the life of me know how microwaves worked. A satellite had arced above us in the heavens that time, a steady red dot in the stars. I’d decided against pointing it out to him as well.
Here now, Abou appraised my work on the machete with the same sort of cocked eyebrow that Mamadou had lifted at my mumbled excuses about the microwave, shook his head. They all did that. Nothing I did seemed to conform to the proper way. I handed the machete over to Abou, tossed him the file, and he braced the long blade between his knees and went to work on it. In his hands, the file rasped thin curls of metal from the blade like ribbons. “See, Adama? Anyone can sharpen a machete. Anyone can grow a field. But it is schoolwork that is hard. Why don’t you come to the school? There are already plenty of people who can do these things you do. Come and teach us about America. Teach us how a money machine is made so that we can make our own.”
Abou’s mother called him to dinner from their hearth, and I tested the blade on a corner of the callus on my thumb. The blade ran through it as if it were a cheese rind. Yes, the machete was sharp, much sharper than I had a knack for making it yet. I lit a cigarette as the last of the stars came out, and Abou and his brothers sat on their haunches and ate with their hands from the bowl of toh their mother had set down for them. The youngest waved to me when he saw me looking. Above them hung the tilt of the Southern Cross and as I settled into my cigarette, I asked myself again, ‘What are you here to do?’
I’d been to the school before, had an open invitation from the director to visit anytime I wanted. The school was a three-mile walk through the forest on the logging road to Séguéla, and was a world of its own. It had been built in the 70s, when cocoa was still an income-producing commodity for Ivory Coast, and though the then-president, Boigny, had robbed the nation’s coffers shamelessly to build the world’s largest Catholic church on the site of his mother’s village, there had still been enough money to construct schools. Along with the schools’ two long buildings were six cinder-block houses for the teachers. There were flowering acacia trees and periwinkle shrubs, a dirt soccer pitch, and one of the only working deep-bore pumps in the region. Every day during the school year, children left the surrounding villages at daybreak to walk to it.
When our school had first opened thirty years before, the plastered and painted walls, the shining metal roofs, must have been a marvel for those mud-hut villagers to see. But the crash of the commodities market in the ‘80s, along with the humid wear of the surrounding forest and the political trouble of the past years, had taken their toll. The paint had long since peeled off, the roofs had rusted, the mortar between the cinder blocks had crumbled, and the school complex looked as though it had been ravaged in a war. The teachers’ homes were squalid; the water from their pump was red. These days, they rarely received their salaries on time, and they hadn’t had a raise in fifteen years. The teachers, Baoulés of the ruling Christian tribe, were angry and overworked, and the students packed the six classrooms so thickly that long rows of them sat on the floor between the crammed benches. No one had any supplies to speak of, whole villages of students shared a handful of textbooks; the soccer terrain was covered in cattle dung, the classrooms had to be swept out each morning for the pellet droppings of the goats that bedded down in them at night, the bush around the school was a minefield of students’ shit because the school had no latrines. To visit the school was to glimpse the decay of Ivorian society.
The teachers were seated around a low table under a mango tree outside the director’s house when I arrived that morning. They were drinking bangi, palm wine, a slow buzz that could be prolonged all day, and eating lush plates of rice and sardines with spoons. Behind me, the school buildings were alive with the sound of children sweeping, laughing, preparing the classrooms for the coming day. It had been months since I’d come to salute the teachers, and even though the village was far away in terms of distances in the bush, that I hadn’t come to salute them was an insult they couldn’t immediately forgive.
They were all big men in colorful pagne shirts, well fed compared to the Worodougou; they were heavier and blacker, proud because of their positions. The director, the oldest and largest among them, shouted back into his house as I approached, and his wife in her wrap came out quickly with a chair for me. When I was seated, the director swal
lowed from his drinking gourd, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, rubbed his face like waking up, glanced at the others, and then at the lightening sky. My presence seemed to burden him like a chore. He sighed and said, “Tell me the news, Jacques.”
“No news, Director. I have only come to salute you.”
He grunted, glanced about. “That is good. That is the proper way. But what is not the proper way is that it is now two months since we’ve seen you. You don’t like us, is it not? If you liked us, you would have come and honored us more often. Too much with the Worodougou. Perhaps you have taken a wife and pray at the mosque with them as well. They call you Adama, isn’t it? A Muslim name.”
They were looking at me, their eyes red, their faces blank. A breeze rustled the mango’s leaves, but that didn’t matter. The director had one lazy eyelid that made him look perpetually sleepy, more imposing because of it, and his head was frosted with gray. The teachers’ shirts were neat and professional, and sitting before them was like suffering an interview.
I lowered my eyes. “I must ask forgiveness. My mission is to live among the Worodougou as they do, to learn their language. I have grown a field so that they can see that I understand their work. It has taken much labor, and I’ve been in the forest every day. Today I have come to salute you. I ask forgiveness on my knees. Every day I have wanted to come. But every day has become a new day when there is work.”
Everyone burst into laughter. Even the wife doubled over. Then the director chuckled and said, “Get up off your knees, white Worodougou. This thing about the knees; only Muslims say this. Can you believe this, my brothers? Here is a whiteman, Muslim words spilling out of his mouth like the morning prayer.”
The teachers swallowed their last bowls of wine, muttered to the director in Baoulé, sauntered off to their classrooms to begin the day. Though I waved it off with my hand, the director passed a gourd of bangi to me. I liked to drink, but didn’t in the village because I didn’t want to offend my neighbors. The constant pressure to drink was one of the reasons I’d stopped visiting the school. But Mamadou had recently taught me how to get out of this one. I took the gourd, poured a long sip of it into the dirt beside my chair and said, “So that the ancestors may drink.”
The director shook his head. He said, “Too long with the Muslims. I am a Baoulé. Baoulés drink bangi; therefore I drink bangi no matter where I am sent to live. Why have you come today, Jacques? What do you want?”
“I’d like to help at the school, Director.”
He looked at me a long time with his one eyelid half closed, swallowed the last of the liquid in the gourd, stood, and considered the morning. In the yard, the teachers were arranging the students into regimented lines before the flagpole to sing the anthem while two older boys raised the Ivorian tricolor. The flag was faded and tattered; another boy hit a scrap of metal with a pipe to call everyone to attention, and when the flag reached the top of the pole, the children followed the teachers’ cue and began to sing. Despite everything, it was a pretty sound.
“Two more months until vacation,” the director said as we listened to the children’s singing. Just before he started off for his classroom, he said to me, “Don’t think that we need your help, white Worodougou. We are trained and have certificates. But come tomorrow nonetheless. We will find something for you to do. Now, stay and eat. Perhaps it’s the diet in the village that has made you lose your sense of respect.”
I sat and ate the sardines and rice that his wife placed before me. We had nothing like sardines in the village, and the time of yam had long passed into the time of horrid toh: cassava gruel. It was a good and decadent meal, and I ate until I was full. The thought of that food made me look forward to the coming days.
Under the stars that night, I told Mamadou my plan to help at the school. After months of dejected ineffectualness, I was excited about something, but as I spoke, he chewed his toh like a steer mulling a cud; he didn’t seem happy for me at all. He said in an even voice, “It is good that you’ve got something to do finally, Adama. But take care of that director. He is not popular here. Everything may not be as it seems. Perhaps he can’t open his one eyelid because he has many secrets to hide behind it.”
Abou was waiting for me at my hut. He met me as I entered the courtyard, took my hand, and led me to my door. He said, “I saw you at the school today, Tonton Adama. How pleased I was. Soon we will learn about the money machine of the whites. Sleep well tonight, so that in the morning you will be ready to teach us.”
In the morning, the director was waiting for me under his tree. The teachers were there, too, drinking bangi, eating sardines, listening to the morning news from Abidjan on a transistor radio. The radio seemed oddly incongruent—a lost artifact of technology in the bush—but there it was. The past months of uprisings by northern Muslims against the government soldiers who controlled their cities had the teachers scared. Deep in enemy territory, they knew their lives depended now on things they couldn’t control, on interpreting the news.
“Drink, Jacques,” the director told me, with his sleepy eye. I emptied the gourd he passed me to the ground and said, “For the ancestors.” The teachers muttered at this. “Like a Muslim,” one said under his breath.
“Bon, Jacques. This is what we have decided. You know that we are overworked, don’t have time to travel and attend to the needs of our relatives. They demand much from us because we are salaried professionals, and grow angry when we do not visit them. Therefore,” the director said, and handed me a box of chalk from his breast pocket, “we will take turns visiting our villages, and as we do, you will supervise our classes. Today Isidore will travel, and you will teach second grade. None of us are happy that someone without a certificate will be in charge of students. But the times being what they are, we have decided to make do.”
The students were lining up in the yard, the boys already raising the flag. I began to protest, I said, “Director, I’ve never taught anything—”
The newscaster on the radio said, “The RDR has called a general labor strike today in Abidjan.”
“Muslims,” Isidore, the second-grade teacher, muttered under his breath.
As the children began to sing, the morning drinking session broke up. Isidore hugged the others good-bye. He was the youngest of them, and the tallest, his first time in the bush after his years at the teachers’ school in the city. He patted me on the shoulder, handed me a long rubber strap cut from the inner tube of a car tire. He said, “I’ll bring you a fresh baguette from the city when I come back, little Worodougou. Don’t worry. But use this. Don’t spare them. The children in the second grade, they are the worst of all. If it breaks, the director will give you another. This is the only thing these children understand.” Then he ran across the soccer terrain to hop on the approaching logging truck.
What was there to do but walk with the teachers to my class, to the seventy students in a motley of uniforms that their parents had pieced together for them smiling at me already from the benches and the floor? They stood like recruits as I entered the dim room. “Bonjour, monsieur!” they shouted. Had anything in my life prepared me for this? For all these children? For teaching in a language I didn’t even speak well? The strap was a repugnant thing in my hand, and the students stood smiling. They were tiny versions of human beings, some covering their mouths with their hands to stifle their laughter. Already, I could hear the straps flying in the other classrooms, the children in them crying out. Corporal punishment was meted out for wrong answers, for daydreaming, for any sort of offense at all. “Sit down, children,” I told them in French, and they sat like falling. Then I said, “Can someone please tell me what your last lesson was?” They blinked at me as though they hadn’t understood.
I saw Abou in the back. I said to him, “Abou, what was your last lesson with Monsieur Isidore?” He looked stricken, scared. “What page are you on in your textbooks?” He shook his head, looked down. “Anybody? Please. What have you been studying?” Tho
se in the front row looked like they might cry now. I shook my head. Flies already worried my eyelashes. “Don’t any of you understand French?”
A small girl, one of the few girls there, raised her hand. I nodded at her. She stood and said slowly, “Bonjour, Monsieur Adama.”
“Yes, good morning, Salimata. What was your last lesson?”
“Bonjour, Monsieur Adama,” she said again. Someone in the back giggled.
I said, “None of you understand French, do you?” They all blinked at me. I said, “I could say anything and you wouldn’t understand.” They stared blankly. In Worodougou, I said, “Can anyone speak French?”
“We can sing the anthem!” a dozen of them called.
“Akain. An be touba kan fô?” ‘Good. But can you speak French?’
Abou raised his hand. He said sagely, “Adama, why are you speaking Worodougou in school? Everyone knows that if we speak Worodougou in school, then we must be whipped.”
“I give you permission, Abou. Can you speak any French?” Abou nodded his head solemnly. “Speak,” I said.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” he said.
I set the box of chalk on the table, went out and across the yellow yard to the director’s class. The students were drawing on their slates with nubs of stone. The director was at his table, reading a newspaper from a stack of them beside him on the floor. The table was old and flimsy, and I noticed that he’d slipped off his shoes beneath it. He blinked at me with his sleepy eye as the students stood. “Bonjour, monsieur!” they said. I waved for them to sit down. The director folded his paper, seemed concerned. He said, “Are they giving you trouble, Jacques? Come, I will show you how to whip them.”
“They can’t speak French, Director. Not a word. How am I supposed to teach them if they can’t speak French?”