Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

  “If they don’t answer your questions, you must whip them. Then they will answer. Let’s go. I will show you.”

  “I don’t want to whip them. I’ll teach them in Worodougou until Isidore comes back.”

  “Impossible. Tribal languages are not allowed in school. French is the national language. The students must study in French.”

  “I’ll try again,” I said.

  “Use the strap. That is what the children know.”

  Back in my classroom, the students had helped themselves to the chalk, had drawn crude gazelles and elephants on the board, were playing soccer with a rag, many were stretched out and asleep, others had painted their faces completely white with the chalk. They stood when I came in, the sleeping ones jerked to their feet by others. They said in unison, “Bonjour, monsieur.”

  “Sit down, children,” I said in Worodougou. “What did you do yesterday?”

  Abou raised his hand. He stood and said, “Monsieur Isidore taught us one to ten.”

  “To write it or to count it?”

  “Both, Adama,” Abou said, and smiled.

  “All right. Let’s count to ten.”

  They counted to ten perfectly in French, like singing a song. I felt a ray of hope. “Now, someone come and take this chalk and write one to ten on the board.” No one raised a hand. There was much embarrassed giggling. Finally, Salimata raised her hand timidly. She was one of those who had painted her face white with chalk. She looked like a mime. I waved her forward and she took the chalk I offered. She was only as tall as my hip, her hair in neat plaits. I urged her to the chalkboard. After a long deliberation, she glanced at me a last time and wrote a perfect capital L. Then she looked at me nervously. I glanced at the crowded class. They were nervous, too, as though all of their fates depended on Salimata’s answer.

  “Sali,” I said in a soft voice, “what number is that?”

  She looked at me a long time, then at the L. She said, “It is this number?” and pointed at the L.

  I felt hopeless. I said, “And that is what number, Sali?”

  “This number,” she said again, and pointed to it with her finger.

  “Which is what number?”

  “This one. This number, Tonton Adama.”

  “Don’t call me Tonton. I’m not ‘Uncle’ at school. I’m ‘Monsieur.’ What is the name of that number, Sali?”

  “Tonton, I don’t know,” she said, and tears fell out of her eyes.

  Abou raised his hand. I pointed at him and he stood. He said, “Now you must whip Salimata, Tonton Adama.”

  “I don’t whip children,” I said. A murmur went through the class. The murmur rose, and they began to have loud conversations. Abou stood again. He said, “Adama, you must whip her. She drew this crazy number that is not a number. So you must whip her. That is the rule.”

  Salimata was trembling and crying. The students offered their consent in loud voices: seventy ten-year-olds urging me to use the whip. I lifted the rubber strap off the table. “Salimata, come here.” She shuffled forward, tears leaking freely. She raised her palms to me like an offering, turned her face away in anticipation of the blow. I lifted the strap high above my head, felt the class draw in its breath. Then I let the strap fall over her palms like a wet noodle. The whole class laughed, and she laughed. For an instant, I felt happy, drowned in the ridiculous situation. Then everyone shut up as the director came in.

  He took the strap from my hand, whipped Salimata three times in the face. He erased the L with a wipe of his hand, wrote a perfect 1. Everything had happened in the blink of an eye.

  “What is this laughing, hey? Imbeciles. Jacques, it will be a long day if you let these children have the best of you. The school is not the village. And an L is not the number 1.” He took a quick tour of the classroom, whipping children indiscriminately. Then he handed me the strap, and Salimata lay on the floor, weeping. I wanted to comfort her but didn’t. We spent the rest of the morning taking turns writing the number 1 on the board, and more than half of them wrote the letter L anyway. I understood then this was the first time most of them had written anything.

  Isidore didn’t come back that day, or any other. I asked the director about it constantly as he and the other teachers drank under the mango tree in the mornings, and he placated me with plates of rice and sardines. There were reports on the radio about an uprising in nearby Mankono, and the teachers were concerned with that. For two weeks, I did my best to teach second grade. Though the textbook was well into addition and subtraction, we worked on counting to twenty. Even I began to use the strap, though I could see in the students’ eyes that they did not fear me. Wednesdays were supposed to be set aside for extracurricular activities: sport, or song and dance, but what Wednesdays really meant was that the teachers took their classes to work for them in their personal fields. The girls chopped firewood while the boys weeded between yam rows. Beatings were general and often. First grade was spent mostly on memorizing the national anthem; after that, it was learn what you could.

  During training, we’d been taken to visit a “typical” Ivorian elementary school. That had been in the well-funded Christian south. The teachers had been kind, and the students well dressed and polite. Everyone had his own textbook, and not once had I seen a strap. But that had been during training, a three-month-long illusion designed to keep the reality of Ivory Coast at bay and us from quitting and going home.

  Being at the Tégéso school depressed me in a profound way. The deep sense of hopelessness that had pervaded the whole country since General Guei’s coup settled into me as well. I longed to return to my fields, where at least the plants still grew. I did what I could mornings and afternoons. At lunch, I ate with the director, the rich food the only good part of any of it.

  Under the director’s mango tree at noon, the teachers gathered to drink and eat, while the children formed long lines for the meager bowls of plain rice that the teachers’ wives sold to them for twenty-five CFA each—about four cents. Those whose parents could not afford this sat in the shade and didn’t eat. They stared blankly at nothing while flies settled on their faces; starving people. At the director’s, in the meantime, we feasted on rice drenched with palm oil, on tins of Moroccan sardines. I’d tease Mamadou in the evenings about the good food I’d had to eat at the school, and he’d look away at the stars. I wished I’d never gone to the director to offer my help, envied my friend’s life in the fields. Teasing him about the good food I’d had to eat was my only way of making my present life seem bearable.

  I wrote to my friend Ryan about the awful strappings, about the illiteracy of the children. He wrote back from his village, “Sounds like the same problems here, Jack. The teachers are underpaid and overworked, trying to foist an unrealistic curriculum on children whose people they are at odds with. It lets them justify stealing the children’s food. The rice, oil, and sardines are provided for free by the World Food Program.”

  I asked Mamadou that night if it was true, and he waved his hand like warding away dust. He said, “A Christian from Abidjan came here in a big car. He said they would give food to the children. For a while it was so. Then the director came and said the program had ended. Now the children pay. Who knows what is really true?”

  In the morning, I asked the director bluntly where the sardines came from. He and the teachers laughed uncomfortably for a moment as they drank, and his wife went into the house. Then the director looked at me with even his lazy eyelid lifted. He said, “You’ve eaten with us as we have, Jacques, have you not? Hasn’t it filled your belly? Hasn’t it given you the energy you need to make it through the difficult day?”

  “I’ve enjoyed it, yes. But where does it come from?”

  They drank their palm wine and looked at nothing. The radio reported another massacre. Then they went off to teach their classes.

  It was the strappings, the hatred toward the Worodougou, Isidore’s extended jaunt, the difficulty of teaching second grade when I wanted to be i
n my fields. After a few days of pointedly refusing to eat lunch with the teachers, of getting no explanation from them about it, I went to the chief. He was lying in his hammock, looking at the stars in his old-man way. I sat on a stool before him. After a time, his cataract-clouded eyes rolled onto mine. “Adama,” he said and grinned, “you’ve come to tell me that you’ve finally secured a tractor for us, is it not?”

  “The director of the school is stealing food from the village.”

  Mamadou was with me in his boubous, as always. He looked at his toes while the chief rocked back in his hammock and gazed at the stars. Some long moments passed as he swung with his hands folded over his chest. It was as though the chief had heard something he didn’t want to know. Then he looked at me again and said, “Is this true, Adama? Think cautiously. Is this something I need to know?”

  Mamadou didn’t offer me any support. I inhaled deeply, almost sadly. I said, “It’s true, Father. The food at the school has been given to the children for free. The director takes the best things for himself, makes the children pay for the rice that remains. He shouldn’t have any of it. It all belongs to the children.”

  “Mamadou, Koné’s son, is this something that I need to know?” the chief asked.

  “Adama has discovered it. It is a very important thing, as he says.”

  The chief shook his head. He said, “Adama, I have welcomed you here as my son. You have come to tell me something, and now I know it. Every gift is held by two hands: the one that gives, and the one that takes away”

  It was still early evening. Mamadou and I followed the chief on the logging road to the school. The director and the teachers were drinking at the table like apparitions by lamplight, bowls of rice and sardines before them. They didn’t rise as we approached. Then we were standing before them, Mamadou holding the chief’s arm to support him. The director nodded to the chief without looking him in the eyes. Then he asked, “The news?” in French, and for the first time, I heard French words leave the chief’s mouth. He said in a soft village patois, “Adama has been teaching at the school, is it not?”

  “It is,” the director said, and nodded into his gourd of palm wine.

  The chief said, “If one allows the agouti to thrive in one’s fields, then one must expect corn to fall. You will send the foreign gift to the village in the morning. So you have enjoyed awhile. Now it is finished.”

  The director nodded and the chief called us away. As we left the school under the stars, I understood that the chief had known about the theft, that I had caused the collapse of some delicate system they had devised among themselves.

  “You should have told me,” I said to Mamadou as we smoked on stools outside my hut in the night. He exhaled a long plume of smoke at the stars, scratched his foot, and said, “You are the whiteman. It is your place to tell us. We didn’t ask for that gift, or this trouble it has brought us. Why are you upset, Adama? The monkey eats guava, the francolin eats rice. Don’t be upset to have done what was right in your heart.”

  In the morning, boys brought the sacks of rice and crates of oil and sardines to the chief’s compound on their heads, and the teachers used the pretext of a Muslim uprising in distant Boundiali to leave for the city “How long will you be gone?” I asked the director on the roadside, but he only shook my hand good-bye as he stepped up onto the bush transport, which was already crowded with his family and bags. He winked his lazy eye. He said, “Thank you for these past weeks, for your help. Adama! What a great help you have been! Maybe the old chief will guard the food better than we have. Inshallah, isn’t it? For the food and for our return. Inshallah. It all depends on God.” As the truck lifted dust in the breaking morning, I went to the school and dismissed the classrooms. The students would not leave. Sitting in the classrooms was better than laboring in the fields, as their parents would make them do if they went home.

  For some long days, I thought about quitting, about leaving the village and going home. When Abou would come and sit outside my hut in the evening, he’d look at me with a pained face. “White babies can’t walk when they are born, can they, Adama?”

  “No, they can’t.”

  “And there isn’t any money machine.”

  “No.”

  Abou didn’t offer to help me with my machete any longer.

  Soon enough an old man died. I didn’t know him, but Mamadou told me he had been important. Everyone in the village put on their best boubous and went to the chief’s compound to mourn. I did, too. Soon, long trains of mourners began to arrive from surrounding villages. We all sat on mats, the women on one side, the men on the other, the colors of our robes a vivid pageant against the dirty village. An old and toothless griot told stories of the ancestors and the seasons, the old women wailed, the young women cooked over great pots. Then the funeral feast was served. It was all the rice and sardines from the school, gone in a day.

  A calabash of food was placed in front of me, the chief’s eldest wife brought me a spoon so I wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of all these strangers. The day was long and yellow, a faint wind in the mango leaves above my head. I set the spoon aside, dipped my fingers into the calabash to eat like everyone else. Beside me, Mamadou watched as I fumbled with the food. “Like this,” he said, tucking his long fingers into the rice, drawing a dollop of it to his mouth with grace and ease. I took a breath, focused myself on that one simple act. Everyone seemed to watch as I tried again.

  THE FRANCOLIN HUNTER

  I’d undergone three months of training in a modern, Christian village, near the capital, Abidjan, before being sent to Tégéso. During training, I and the seventeen other volunteers of my group had daily classes in West African French and the individual tribal languages we’d need in our villages; we also learned other things, such as how to build wells, and how to treat those wells for cholera, which broke out every rainy season all over Ivory Coast. We were energetic young Americans during training; we studied frenetically, shook hands with everyone we met, made messes of ourselves eating foutou and peanut sauce with our fingers, talked politics. We diagrammed extensive theories of rural development on the blackboards of the schoolrooms the organization rented for us. We went to church on Sundays with our cocoa-growing host families; we made sweaty love to each other late at night under the blossoming mango trees on the sandy bank of the dark Comoé River. Some of us made plans of marriage, of the children we’d have once we’d finished our service, how we’d tell those children as they grew, “Mommy and Daddy met in Africa.” But first, we were going to change the world.

  A year in, nine of us had gone home, one to a mental asylum, and two more were laid up in the Western hospital in Abidjan with malaria. I managed to stay, and when I’d get sick, I’d sweat it out on my mat in my hut. Part of it was I liked it there. Another part was that I was afraid to fail. Even those days that I wanted to spend alone in my hut, I would rise, wash my body from a bucket in the tall grass, take a few deep breaths as I searched the pale sky for answers to the new questions forming inside me, and I’d wind my way to the chief’s compound at the village’s center. At each hearth, I would offer my morning salutations. It was difficult to give of myself that openly, it was work, and I knew the Worodougou found my white presence in their village ridiculous. For a long time, I spoke their language and fumbled with their customs like a child. Then one day, I didn’t anymore.

  This was nearly one year to the day that I had arrived with my small backpack off a logging truck whose Burkinabé driver, as I signaled him to stop, looked at me with a nervous face and said, “What? Here? What is it? You got to pee?”

  “No, man. This is it. Tégéso. This is where I’m going to live.”

  He didn’t even come to a complete stop, as though he thought that if he did, he’d have to live there with me. Hopping off the truck, I felt I was stepping down onto the unknown surface of an unexplored planet. The truck rolled away, the red dust settled, and as I turned to face what would be my home for the next three
years, the villagers set down their implements and gathered: the women their pestles, the men their machetes and short-handled hoes, the children their rag balls, hoops, and sticks. The village was a collection of thatched huts surrounded by the tall walls of the forest. We stared some long moments across the short road at each other. The primitiveness of the village fell on me like a sudden weight, and as I looked at all those people looking back at me, I’d never felt so white. For the first time I allowed myself this thought: What am I doing here?

  Of course the organization had sent an envoy to prepare Tégéso for my arrival, but that had been months before, and though every day during training we had been reminded that soon we would each have to step down from a vehicle and into our lives in Africa, the reality of that had seemed as theoretical as our optimistic plans for starting pump-building cooperatives and fish farms. I understood two things immediately: that I was white and would be no matter what I did, and that not one thing I’d learned in training would have a practical application in this place. I set down my pack, crumpled inside myself. The crowd rushed to me, and my bag was hoisted onto a small boy’s head, and another child led me by the hand to the compound of the chief.

  I would never see the village assembled in its entirety as I would that first day. It was hot; I felt like crying. I was afraid to even look at my hands; I knew they would be shaking. I sat on a stool across from the chief in his chair, and many words were said, but I don’t know what, and by many voices, but I don’t know whose. Flies landed on my forearms and I let them. One pair made love. I had never been so closely examined by so many people. I had never been so acutely aware of my own existence, or wanted something so desperately to end. As the great flux of those first moments ebbed, words came through the heat to me. The thin old chief spoke in his rasping and weathered voice. He said, “Know that you are welcome here, Adama. Adama Diomandé,” and he tapped his staff down on the earth with finality. In this way I lost my American identity, was given my Worodougou name: Adama, the Muslim version of Adam, the first man, and Diomandé, Dio—’of the,’ Mandé—Mandé, or Malinké, people. No one there ever really learned my Western name, or cared. With time, even this wouldn’t matter to me.