Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

  How can I say when trust was built between myself and them? The most important thing was simple time, and a close second was language. Each evening in the early days, I sat in the chief’s courtyard by the fire among his young sons, and I’d point to my nose, my ears. They would laugh and tell me the Worodougou words: “Nu-ay-o, Adama, now-o,” and I’d write them in my notebook. In the mornings, I’d walk through the village, teasing the children that followed me, “These are my eyes, this is my nose.”

  “What’s this, Adama whiteman?” a naked seven-year-old would say and lift up her leg.

  “Bau-o, ” I’d say, and they’d all laugh.

  “What’s this?” another would say, and point to his penis, and I’d blush and say, “Mogo-o.” Then they’d all cover their mouths and run away.

  I enjoyed the forest, found it mystical, overwhelming, secret, beautiful. Perhaps I didn’t fear the forest because I didn’t know enough about it. When the jibes of my neighbors about my white skin and hairy legs would get to be too much to bear, I’d often follow a path between the trees, find a tall mahogany to sit against, and listen to the birds and monkeys chattering in the canopy. It was hot there, and I sweat even sitting down. I’d sweat like that for three years.

  Because I didn’t have a wife or children, I wasn’t a real man to the Worodougou, and I took up hunting to compensate for that. After a year of hearing the reports sound from deep in the forest as I’d sit in the village cleaning my toenails with a matchstick, I went to Séguéla, the regional capital, and spent some of the only real money I ever would there, $100, for a handmade twelve-gauge shotgun. This was a traditional weapon, the sort that Samory Touré’s men fought the French with before they lost the Malinke homelands to the colonizer: an imitation of the real thing, a handcrafted copy of what the Africans had seen, and wanted for themselves.

  For three days, I stayed at the blacksmith’s compound in Séguéla, watching him make my gun for me. He was an old man, nearsighted, a pure and devout Dioula from Odienné, his prayer cap on his bald head dirtied from the grime of his work. Guns were oudawed by the ruling Christian government, and the blacksmith’s compound was situated in a secluded thicket of grass along the marsh at the edge of town. His small boys played marbles and kept watch along the road; his wives were polite and modest, as was in keeping with the household of a respected man. I conducted business with him in Worodougou. Getting my gun felt racy and exciting. I knew I was breaking important rules, and I didn’t care. To make the gun, the blacksmith sawed a three-foot length from a long water pipe, heated the end, and tapped into it a round length of metal to widen the bore to take a shell. The action he made from metal scraps, hammering the hot pieces into shape on his anvil, a discarded engine block. It was delicate work, stunning to watch done so efficiently. The lush voice of Oumou Sangaré from the old man’s tape player relaxed us as she sang songs from the desert, and beside him, his blind son carved the stock from a marbled piece of ebony. We drank tea and smoked cigarettes. The blacksmith asked me, “Do you miss your mother, Adama whiteman?”

  “Very much so, Father.”

  “So why is it that you have left her?”

  “I want to know your people. I want to go home and tell her about you and how you made this gun.”

  “Ah, that is good. A cub must make a long journey before he returns home as a lion.”

  When the gun was finished and assembled, a lesser imam was called, and after he’d chanted over and blessed my weapon, I gave him coins and kola nuts from my pocket. The blacksmith appraised the barrel’s line a final time with his one eye. Then, with a smile, he handed it to me. I shouldered the gun, pointed it at the sky, pulled the trigger, and the action clicked. It felt good.

  “Adama?”

  “Yes, Father?”

  “When you kill the animal, thank his spirit like you would a brother.”

  “I will.”

  “Adama?”

  “Yes, Father?”

  “Bring meat to the people you love.”

  To bring the gun back to the village, I had to negotiate three government checkpoints. This was a very scary trip. Violence had been flaring up again between the Muslim and Christian tribes the past months, and everyone was on edge. Whole villages of Muslims had been hacked to pieces by drunken Christian youth, and as foreigners, we should have been pulled out by the organization. But the U.S. government supported the Christian tribes, just as the French had all through the colonial days, and to pull us out would have meant admitting that things weren’t as stable for their puppet government as the western companies, trading in Ivory Coast for cocoa, rubber, and timber, and selling Coke and cigarettes, wanted to hear. Not one of the northern Muslims I lived with had a positive memory of a white person to speak of. Some of the old men in my village had been forcibly conscripted by the French to fight in World War II, and many others remembered when their grandfathers had been taken away in chains to work the French cocoa fields, and build their mansions at Grand Bassam. Still, they gave me a hut, and a bowl of rice or toh three times a day.

  Living among the Worodougou, I saw firsthand how the Christian southerners kept the Muslims in a state of poverty so that they’d have no other option but to work as laborers on the commercial plantations. The soldiers at the checkpoints knew I knew this. I didn’t go to Séguéla often anymore because every time I did, I was subjected to humiliations. One soldier in particular, a sergeant, an older man with buck teeth and a paunch at the Kavena checkpoint, liked to press the barrel of his sidearm to my temple and make me sing the U.S. national anthem. Another time, he made me do push-ups. And once, when he was very drunk, he reached in the window of the bush truck I was seated in and slapped me across the face. “Do you pray to Allah yet, white Worodougou?” he shouted at me. “How is it that you’ve lived here all this time and you haven’t once come to the barracks to salute me in front of my officers?” The villagers traveling with me, mostly old women taking yams to market, kept quiet out of fear, and even after the soldiers had drawn the nail-studded plank from the roadway to let us pass, no one said a word. I know this was because they didn’t want to call attention to my shaming. I also know that they told their families about it, and in this way I became known in Worodougou villages where I’d never even set foot.

  I put the pieces of my gun in a rice sack under my seat, and for how awful trips like that usually were, the ancestors were on my side this time and the soldiers simply waved us through. If they’d found it, they would have had the right to shoot me. But they didn’t find it. In my hut, I assembled my gun, wiped its length with a cloth like praying, filled my pockets with shells the blacksmith had acquired for me from a Peul contrabander, and went into the forest to kill something. Everyone was occupied with chores and nobody saw me go.

  All through the forest were paths, and now and again through the gloom, sunlight would glimmer ahead like at the end of a tunnel. This would be someone or other’s fields, and in this way, the forest around Tégéso became for me a sort of labyrinth of adventures. Some of the paths led to golden fields of rice, others to symmetrical quilts of yam mounds. Even better were the silent rows of cashew trees. These were spaced widely enough that I could walk easily through them on the clean and weedless earth. I knew that these fields and orchards were full of animals that troubled the crops. There were long-toothed agouti, a kind of giant rodent that was prized for its succulent flesh and could fell a quarter acre of corn in the short expanse of a night. There were short-haired bush pigs that liked to uproot cassava. There were troops of red monkeys that would take a single bite out of every papaya in a tree. And above and beyond all were the double-spurred francolins, a grouselike wild chicken that ravaged rice and scratched sweet potatoes and yams loose from the soil.

  The francolins were what called me. Now and again as I’d work in the fields, a pair of them would flush from under my feet in great and heart-stopping explosions of wing, and before I’d even had time to understand what had happened, I’d se
e the heavy-bodied birds coasting on their outstretched wings to drop in the distant crops again. I felt that this was a greater challenge than even the larger game offered: to stalk a waving field of rice, gun at the ready; to stop when my senses flared; to hold my breath; to concentrate even the hairs on my arms to the when and where of the flush; and just when I’d give up the moment to a false trick of light and desire and wind, the francolins would leap up like firecrackers. I shot at a dozen and missed them all.

  Chauffeur, my neighbor, came to my hut in the dark depth of the new night. All through the village, the night fires burned like markers of humanity, and above, the stars were talc tossed across black paper. I sat on the dirt and the older man took my stool. He lit a cigarette and released a plume of smoke to the night.

  “Adama?” he said in his measured and graveled voice.

  “Yes, Father?”

  “You’re not afraid of the forest, are you?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve never known a whiteman before.”

  “I never knew Africans until I came to this village.”

  He sighed, smoked, scratched his knee through his worn field trousers. Even though a year had passed, I had spoken to him rarely, was surprised and flattered that he had come to me in this way. He was old enough to be an elder, but he seemed to participate in nothing. Even on Fridays, I had never once seen him in a bright-colored boubous, heading to the village mosque.

  “Do you have a wife in your country, Adama?”

  “No, Father.”

  “Is your father living?”

  “No. He joined the ancestors seven years ago, just when I became a man.”

  Chauffeur grunted, as though a truth had been told. His difference from the other men, even from the chief, was pointed. While they asked me for cigarettes or coins now and again when no one was looking, asked me questions like, “Adama, did you whitemen really travel to the moon?” Chauffeur seemed to take my presence in stride. He was a thin man given to field labor; he had four hardworking wives who never seemed to quarrel amongst themselves as the other men’s wives always did. What I knew about Chauffeur was that he brought strange herbs, roots, and vines with him in bundles from the forest in the evenings, and that he was a great hunter. Mamadou had also told me that Chauffeur had driven a cab in Abidjan as a young man; hence his name.

  “Adama, do you understand that the people here fear the forest?”

  “I’ve seen that they are nervous in the fields as the sun begins to set, Father.”

  “Adama, this village, we as people, we are only visitors here. The village is carved from the forest, and it is our true place. It is only in the village that things are as they appear. When we leave the village on a path, we leave the world of men and enter the world of the spirits and ancestors. Here, we stand on real ground and the sky above us is as it should be; the village is a small scrap of floating bark that we cling to like ants in water. When we enter the forest, all is as though upside down.”

  “Yes, Father,” I said.

  “Adama? Why have you brought a gun to the village?”

  Something embarrassed rose in me, and I made it settle again. I said to him, “The men have guns here. I wanted one for my own. I want to hunt. I want to contribute in some way.”

  “You are not a man here.”

  “I know,” I said, and looked at my hands in the dark.

  “You have fired twelve shots in the three days since you’ve brought the gun. You are shooting in the air, so it’s green money, or francolin, or bat that you are hunting.”

  “It’s francolin, Father. I’m hunting the francolin.”

  “Do you know his name, Adama?”

  “No.”

  “U-a-o.”

  “U-a-o.”

  “Would you like to be a hunter of the u-a-o, Adama?”

  “Very much.”

  He drew on his cigarette a last time, inhaled the smoke like swallowing it, crushed the butt out under his bare heel. He said, “I’ll wake you in the morning. Don’t wash your face.”

  Islam came late to the Worodougou. Of the varied Malinke peoples, the Worodougou are unique because they live in the southern forest. Because of their relative isolation—Tégéso, for example, means “The Cut-Off Village”—they were able to retain their belief in the power of the ancestors. Samory Touré, the Malinkes’ greatest hero, was in some ways the Worodougous’ worst enemy. He fought the French colonizers late into the nineteenth century, and as first Bondoukou, then Kong, Korhogo, and Odienné fell to the white armies, Touré fought a last-ditch scorched-earth campaign. He arrived with his cavalry in Séguéla in the early 1890s, the French close on his heels, and as with any desperate cause, he needed a focal point around which to rally the people. Touré chose Islam, and when he arrived among the ancestor-worshipping Worodougou, he gave the villagers an ultimatum: Convert to true Islam, or his men would force the village mothers to crush their infants in their millet mortars. Most villages acceded. But in a few, like Gbena, five miles to the east of Tégéso, so great was the peoples’ trust in their beliefs that a whole generation of Worodougou were pounded to pulp in their forming bones. In the end, the French cornered Touré in a dark forest near the Cavally River in Liberia. He had nowhere left to run and legend says that they cut him to pieces.

  Now, all Worodougou villages have two things in common: a baobab tree, thick and mighty, planted when the village was founded, and a small cinder-block building with a cupola, often painted yellow, which is the village mosque. Genies and witchcraft are still vibrant among them, and while they turn to the imam to settle simple disputes of marriage and land, when there’s a real problem, they turn to the witch doctor, the man charged with guarding the spiritual health of the village. Chauffeur was the witch doctor of Tégéso. I lived next door to him.

  I followed Chauffeur into the forest that morning. It was a great honor that he would spend time with me. Even in the dark, he knew his way with ease, and my gun slung over my shoulder, I followed the whisper of his feet on the hard dirt of the path, and the acrid smoke of his cigarette. The forest was silent and black, seething, seeming in that silence even more stupendous than it really was. Beside the trunk of a great teak, Chauffeur stopped us. The sky was indigo now between the moving leaves of the canopy, and America and my life there felt as far away as they really were. I could feel the beating of my heart. I can say this: In the forest, I felt alive.

  “First,” Chauffeur said to me in the dark, “take off your sandals.”

  I did what he said even though I worried that my whiteman’s soles were too soft to not be cut by some stray twig or stone.

  “Now eat this,” he told me, and passed a small handful of dry powder into my hand. I tossed it into my mouth, mulled it with my tongue until it formed a ball, and then I swallowed it. It tasty woody and rotten. It tasted like dirt mixed with gunpowder.

  “We’ll sit among the grass at the edge of this field. Imagine that you are the grass, Adama. That is all I want you to do as we wait for the u-a-o. The u-a-o is afraid of men for all that we have done to him, as with all the animals but the ones who live with us. Grass to the u-a-o is as the village is to us, and if we are grass, he will not be afraid. Give me your gun.”

  I handed Chauffeur my gun and he set it against the tree. Then we moved into a cashew orchard, sat in the thick elephant grass that grew at its edge.

  I tried to think of nothing, to become one with the growing plants and the soil. The first light fell between the cashew trees, and in it, all sorts of animals came forth from the forest. First came the striped ground squirrels that sniffed and reached out their paws as they went, as though testing the ground for solidity. Then a troop of red monkeys came through on all fours, the males looking about like soldiers, the group stopping a minute to sit and groom each other like a family on the move. At one point, the monkeys were close enough to speak to, and I wondered if Chauffeur would shoot this easy meat. I looked where I knew he had been sitting, a few arms’
lengths from me, and was surprised to find that I could not pick him out at all. Yes, the light was still faint, but I knew he was there and I made myself see him; he could have been stone, he sat so still. As he rested on his haunches, even his eyes no longer seemed to move. Three bush pigs jogged through with their tails erect, and then the animals cleared the field. The light gathered its first hints of yellow. I held my breath. It was then that I heard them. On the dry leaves of the forest floor, their footsteps sounded like those of cautious men. They seemed to be all around us, the world noisy with them. I looked at Chauffeur and saw his eyes turn at mine; a smile when he could not offer one.

  There they were: in the open expanse under the trees, the francolins, a dozen of them, already close and closing, stepping and scratching, bobbing their heads as they fed, raising them up to scent the air like deer. They seemed beautiful in their speckled breasts; arrogant and sure; everything a chicken would have been if it could be what it once was. Some were close enough now to kill with a slingshot, and I noticed the dark stripes by their sharp eyes, the brown and white plumage of their dun breasts. For an hour we watched them. I saw how the chicks, almost grown, waited for the hen to gurgle “all clear” before they followed, how the males strutted and kept guard. Sunlight fell all over the orchard, and the francolins filled their crops with the black ants that had converged on the fallen cashew apples.

  Just as suddenly as they’d appeared, they hurried to the cover of the forest. I looked at Chauffeur and he set his fingers against his lips. Along the way, on the path, two young boys in shorts came laughing into the field with calabash bowls under their arms. They pried the nuts from the fallen fruit, filled their bowls, and went away again. I understood then that we could have killed them, too.