Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

  I began to teach Mamadou the specifics of AIDS under his mothers mango tree, made him record the information in a notebook I’d bought from a passing Peul merchant. I drew grossly detailed anatomical pictures in it to make things clear. He cringed at these, tried again and again to close the cover over the notebook as he held it on his knees.

  Everything in training had been about “sustainability.” It was the keyword of those who would aid the global south in the current era, learned through forty decades of big dreams and failed projects. Though I would reside in Tégéso for years, one day I would have to go home. For any project I would initiate to be successful, it would have to live on after I was gone. I’d decided that mine would live on through Mamadou.

  I wrote to Abidjan about my plan and, for once, heard back from them. A small package came for me on a logging truck, and Mamadou and I closed the door of my hut to open it away from the prying eyes of the children who had gathered outside to see what was going on.

  Mamadou slit the tape of the package with his thick thumbnail as I turned up the flame of my hurricane lamp in the dark of my hut. His hands drew open the flaps of the box, and inside, the round condoms glinted in their yellow wrappers like gold coins. There was a letter from the agency, from the under-director. It said, “Dear Jack. We’re pleased with your perseverance up there despite the uncertainty of the times. Your new project is wholly in keeping with the mission. Take great care in how you impart this information. It’s a conservative people you live among.”

  Mamadou sifted through the condoms like a kid searching breakfast cereal for the toy inside the box. He was as enraptured as anyone there would be by this package from the outside world. His hand found something, and he looked at me with excited eyes. He withdrew an oblong piece of wood that at first glance resembled a thick and short pestle.

  “Adama? This strange wooden thing, what is this?” he said, waving it about like a sword, jabbing the air between us with it.

  “What do you think it is?” I said.

  He looked at it along its length, held it to his nose and sniffed it. He said, “It’s some kind of whiteman tool.”

  “Every man possesses this tool, Mamadou. Every man of every color.”

  “What? Hey? A piece of wood like this?” He touched the carved knob at the end, looked at it again. Then he saw it for what it was, dropped it back in the box. He wiped his hands on his shirt, looked at me, and grimaced.

  “It’s a penis, Mamadou. A penis made of wood.”

  His eyes were wide. He said, “Oh, no, Adama. Oh, no, Adama, please. I want to stop. Don’t make me do this.”

  Someone banged on the door. A young man’s voice said, “Eh, Adama? Mamadou, Koné’s son? What’s going on in there? Something came from Abidjan, is it? What are all these children doing here sitting in the dust?” It was Bébé. The young men had come home from the fields.

  “Adama, please,” Mamadou said, like begging.

  I nodded at him, smiled. I folded the letter into the short stack of correspondences I kept under my mat like a pillow. I took my wicker hat off the peg on the wall, put it on. I picked up the wooden penis, shook it at him. “Youll thank me for this one day, Mamadou,” I promised. I filled my pockets with condoms. Then I pushed open the door onto the evening, onto the young men in their filthy field clothes who had gathered outside to find out what we were up to.

  “Do you know what this is?” I said, holding up the penis like a revelation.

  Their eyes widened, and they circled in. Even some of the nearby dogs crept closer.

  “Sit down,” I told them. “Mamadou will do his best to explain it to you.”

  For all of his initial reluctance and embarrassment, Mamadou quickly became an expert AIDS educator. I had a laminated ID card made for him in Séguéla, and he wore it everywhere: Méité Mamadou, Rural AIDS Instructor. He used money he’d saved over the years to have a professional pagne shirt made. We went together to Séguéla to report on our work to the Director of Rural Health. People in the village began to ask Mamadou all sorts of questions on medical issues. I think he got the idea that he was a doctor.

  The dry season came, the harvests were in, the cotton stood in tall piles outside the chief’s compound like snow. There were many people moving on the logging roads that ran between the villages now: Senoufo field workers heading home to Korhogo, Kulongho slaves heading to their distant homeland in the northeast to find out who had been born since they had been gone, who had died. There wasn’t much work. The villages were full and lively.

  In our wicker hats, Mamadou and I would set out with small bundles tied to our backs: a few cooked yams, stoppered calabashes of water. We’d bring our guns, shoot francolin and striped ground squirrel along the way. We traveled through forest and savanna in our flip-flops. We met many people and exchanged news with them. We came to swamps where the ibis nested in great flocks like white assemblies of the ancestors; we came out of the forest onto wide, open plains where the granite whalebacks stood up in the distance like old men’s bald heads. We climbed one to see the great stretch of the land: the thick forest wall to the south with the lahou birds coasting above it like kites; the yellow savanna to the north with the acacias and baobabs standing like sentinels in the thick grass. We bartered cigarettes for milk from a band of Peul wandering with their cattle; Mamadou showed me pictographs on a stone outcropping: giraffes and leopards carved by an expert hand that we both understood belonged to a people much older than we were. We slept in the bush around fires of twigs with our wraps drawn about our shoulders like the stars. And here and there we would come to a village where the women and children would lead us to their old chief in a great entourage, everyone leaving their labor to witness these great goings-on.

  “Old chief,” Mamadou would say, his ID card affixed to the breast of his shirt, “we’ve come from Tégéso to salute you. We bring the greetings of our chief and people.”

  “Tégéso? Eh? How is old Méméfa? Is that sneaky pangolin still alive? He never was one to take up the machete. Happy to lie in his hammock until time came to visit one of his wives.”

  “He greets you, Father.”

  “Eh? You must greet him for me when you return.”

  “And who is this?” the chief would say, and look at me. Always what would ensue was a half hour or more of the chief asking me simple questions like, “What is your name again? How old are you?” just so everyone could laugh and marvel at my command of Worodougou: myself as a trick pony.

  “Hey!” these chiefs would finally say, slapping their knees and looking at Mamadou. “Who could have imagined a whiteman speaking our language! And you are his guardian? Young son, you have honored yourself and your village. Now the world will know who we are.”

  In this way, Mamadou and I visited the fourteen villages of the Tégéso subregion, Tégéso fo-ma, the Worodougou district along the edge of the forest of which Tégéso was the ancient capital. We visited the great villages of Soba, Banandjé, Somina, Gbena, Wye, Kavena, Sualla, Kénégbé, Djamina; we visited the campements in the bush that were a handful of huts and would be villages of their own in generations to come. The teaching didn’t begin immediately but required preliminary visits to introduce ourselves to the chiefs and state our intentions, and then the chiefs would announce a date when they would assemble their young people to hear our lesson. In this way, I learned the unity of the Worodougou in custom and language, understood how news spread by travelers kept these scattered outposts sealed in a cultural web.

  The francolins rose out of the bush in the evenings, and Mamadou and I shot them. Then we’d pluck them, gut them, spit them over a small fire, talk about the world and our lives in it until Orion’s Belt appeared square overhead and sleep came to us both. While he’d been ashamed of the wooden penis before, now he wouldn’t let me carry it. He said, strangely, that it had begun to speak to him in his dreams. There were times now when he’d conduct the lectures almost by himself, and it was a visual thing, wa
tching his estimation of himself grow.

  One night, lying on the opposite side of a small fire in the bush while on our way to another village, Mamadou said to me as I looked up and considered the vast stars, “I never imagined I would travel as widely as this, Adama. I never could have dreamed that I would see the world. Imagine it! A poor farmer’s son!

  “I will miss you when you are gone, Adama. I miss you already when I think about it. In distant years, you must come back and we will share our children with each other.”

  But this is the story of Djigulachédougou, the village of ‘Where the Men Fall Down,’ and what happened to us there.

  Djigulachédougou was a neat and traditional village a great length from Tégéso, miles in the forest. There were legends about it. Everyone there was rumored to be a sorcerer. Who knows why? Perhaps it was because the Worodougou were not a forest people. While many of their villages lay along the edge of it, the Djigulachés lived deep in the trees.

  It was a day’s walk in to it from Soba, which was already two full days from Tégéso by foot. There wasn’t a road but a path, as there had been no roads to any of them before the French colonizers whipped long gangs to hack and burn tracks through the forest to facilitate the extraction of lumber, cotton, and, most of all, labor for the great southern cocoa plantations. Somehow, the village of Djigulachédougou had escaped that.

  The chief of Soba, a teasing and happy old man with one empty eye socket and leprosy-eaten stubs for fingers, walked us to the path that led into the gloom of the forest the morning after our lecture there. This was the way to Djigulachédougou. He said a benediction for us at the trailhead, scattered some rice for the ancestors, and, in his laughing way, warned us again not to go.

  “They are not people like we are,” the old man laughed and said, pointed one stub at the sky as if warning of rain. “The sous-prefet came and offered to build them a road some years ago. They refused. Why approach the dog that snarls? Stay with us another night. Tell us more about these plastic bags that you say whitemen wear over their mogos to guard their health.”

  “We will come and speak about it again soon, Father,” Mamadou told him. “But first we must do this.”

  “Tell me,” the old chief said in a conspiratorial whisper, “can the plastic bags be washed and used again?”

  “No, Father,” Mamadou said in a slow voice, and shook his head. “Condoms must only be used once. Think of it like this: Once you have peeled the banana, you must throw away the skin.”

  “Then give me another, son. My wives eat many bananas.”

  The forest was thick around us on the narrow path to Djigulachédougou, dark and silent; it was like trekking through vast and cavernous catacombs. While excited to be going where few, if any, Westerners had been, I found myself nervously fingering the trigger of my gun. Mamadou must have felt it, too. When we took a break to smoke cigarettes and drink from our calabashes by a long-forgotten termite mound in the gloom, he said, “Who would want to live like this? No road? Always as though its night? Why should we care about this one crazy village?”

  “Why should we?” I nodded and said from my haunches, exhaling smoke.

  “Ah, Adama, it’s the penis. The wooden penis. Once, I feared it. Now, it calls to me in my dreams, tells me to carry it everywhere.”

  In the late afternoon, we heard the rhythmic thunking of pestles in mortars—the sound of the West African village—and soon enough saw light between the trees. We stepped out into the village, and as our eyes adjusted to the sun, we saw the round huts, their thatched roofs like pointed hats, and goats and chickens here and there. Some naked children were playing a skipping game, clapping their hands and laughing; they took one look at us, at me, and ran shrieking for the trees. An old woman cracking palm kernels for soap carefully set down her pounding stone, crawled on all fours into her hut, and shut the door. A line of women stopped where they were going, their mouths hanging open. What I noticed were the huge calabashes on their heads. They were the same size as the metal basins the women in Tégéso used to carry water from the swamp to their hearths: This village didn’t even have the basic modern implements that women elsewhere took for granted. We walked into the village center, and adults came from everywhere to gather around us and stare. Not one person said anything.

  “Sorcerers,” I said to Mamadou under my breath.

  The crowd shepherded us to a covered paillote, and under it on a carved stool was a great-bellied old man holding a gnarled staff: the chief. He wore a crown of rooster tail feathers around his thick scalp. We laid down our guns, sat in the dust before the chief with our legs crossed and our heads bowed. Mamadou took his laminated ID card from his pocket and clipped it to his shirt like an afterthought.

  The whole village crowded in around us: I’d never seen people with so little in the way of Western clothes. Many of the women were bare breasted and the men wore the most modest of khaki shorts. The chief was the fattest I had ever seen, his skin like ink He tossed a handful of monkey knuckles into the dirt, looked at them, grunted, gathered them again, and dropped them into an antelope-skin pouch. “The news!” he said in a booming voice.

  Mamadou set a leaf package of kola nuts at the chief’s feet. Then I saw that the chief’s legs were swollen with edema. Mamadou said, “Great chief, we have come from Tégéso to salute you.”

  “Tégéso? Where is that?”

  Mamadou glanced at me and I saw that his face was stricken. What were we to do in a place where they didn’t even know what the neighboring villages were? He cleared his throat. He said, “The famous village of Tégéso? The village that Touré could not conquer? It is beyond Soba, Father. Beyond Wye. The most famous village of the great Séguéla fo-ma. Near the road to San Pedro.”

  The chief opened the leaf package, took out a pale nut, popped it into his mouth like a fat cashew. He waved away a fly that had landed on his nose. He said, “Of course I know where it is. I went to high school in Séguéla. I am only giving you a hard time.”

  Mamadou and I looked at each other again. Then Mamadou said, “Great chief, I have come with my white brother to bring news to your people. News about a great danger that threatens us all.”

  “What danger?” the chief said, and leaned in to look at us with a keen eye. The rooster feathers made him look regal.

  “AIDS, Father. We’ve come to teach your people about AIDS.”

  “AIDS! The whiteman’s great lie! There is no AIDS here. Small boy, go home. Who are you to bring a whiteman here and frighten all the women?” He clapped his hands, and a boy hurried forward to gather the kola nuts, to offer the old chief his shoulder and help him stand. “Don’t come back,” the chief said, clearly in pain from the swelling in his legs. “Do you understand me, child? Do not come back to my village.” Then he went into his hut and closed the door.

  Mamadou and I looked at each other, at the wall of people that encircled us. We were dumbfounded. Had anyone ever heard of anything so insulting? We spoke freely together in French, not worried that anyone would understand us here.

  “Is that all he’s going to hear from us?” I said.

  “Apparently that is it.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?”

  “Even I do not know.”

  We sat there awhile, and no one said anything. I could see their feet inching toward us as their circle tightened almost imperceptibly. It was clear that we wouldn’t be offered a hut for the night, as was the custom for travelers. After all, they hadn’t even offered us water.

  “It is finished, can’t you see?” An old woman clapped her hands and shouted as though we hadn’t understood, and we stood from the dust and gathered together our packs and guns, which the crowd had picked up as though to hurry us on our way. It was already approaching evening, and if we really weren’t to be given mats, it was long past time to go. Then the crowd pushed us along until we were at the trailhead that led back to Soba. If the forest had been dark before, now it was black. With a la
st look over our shoulders at those strange people, we started off on the trail. For a while, we walked along calmly, as though walking through unknown forest at night was something we did every day. All that could be seen were long snakes that were vines and glimmering genies that were last patches of light. Finally, something big went crashing through the nearby bracken. Mamadou shouldered me aside, and for two hours, I ran behind him, the terrors of this unknown stretch of forest close in on my heels.

  The chief of Soba had rice and peanut sauce waiting for us in calabashes in the firelight. He laughed as we ate greedily; he wanted to know all that had happened. We told him of the long path through the forest, of the gloom, of the way the people had looked at us, of the fat and strange chief.

  The chief of Soba smoked a cigarette that he held between the stumps of his fingers, grinned at the stars as he swung lazily in his hammock. He said, “That chief, he is strong. He is sick and should have died, but there he is. He went to school, you know. Very rich in his brains. The rest of them, they are like monkeys. They don’t even believe in Allah. Did you see?”

  Mamadou mumbled an assent as he ate.

  “You boys, I knew you would come back. What you are trying to do is good. But that village, that is like the time before. That chief will not admit that the world has changed. He wants it to remain as it was when he was a boy. Too much magic there. Too much in the forest. Ah, but he is a great chief, very funny. Even the Senoufo who go there looking for field work come running back as though chased by dogs.”

  On our sleeping mats in our borrowed hut that night, Mamadou and I recounted what we’d seen. I said, “They didn’t have metal. A few machetes, but that was it. They didn’t have plastic.”